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THE 
CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

BY 
ERNEST SCHNEIDER 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1917 



A 



^L Z77S 



Translation rights reserved 




Copyright, 1917 
Sherman, French &» Company 



SEP 24 1917 






INTRODUCTION 

There soon comes a time in every child's life 
when it begins to notice things and to realize what 
is right and what is wrong. This is especially 
true if the child be of poor parents and must 
early bear a part of the burden of getting a liv- 
ing. And as the child grows older he can see all 
around him that something is wrong, but what it 
is he does not know. Life seems a puzzle. 

Anybody can see that something is wrong, but 
how to improve conditions is a matter of no little 
concern. Millions of reasons are given, investi- 
gating committees galore are put to work trying 
to find the cause, and still things go from bad to 
worse. But the cause of all evils is the lack of 
Christianity. " Lack of Christianity ! " some one 
will say, " with all our churches and services ? " 
Yes, churches enough and religions enough, — or 
rather too many, — but Christianity does not 
exist. In the following pages I will give my 
analysis of life and the rules which will, if put into 
practice, insure us a life as the Creator intended 
we should live it. I hope the day will come when 
this selfish life as it exists will be extinct and in 
its stead will reign the altruistic life as taught by 
Christ. Give Christianity full swing, and heaven 
on earth we will have. Then, and then only, can 
man be the highest creation of God, whereas in 
this degenerate state he is an abomination. 



PREFACE 

Upon studying existing conditions one comes to 
the conclusion that things are not equal in this 
world. One is born as a pauper, another a mil- 
lionaire. These are the extremes, with all the in- 
termediates between. The pauper is subject to 
the same physical laws as the millionaire. He 
must eat, have clothing and shelter. We will not 
particularly take into account the unfortunates 
who are born cripples, as their physical handicap 
prevents them from being 100% able, and for a 
comparison only able bodied persons should be 
taken. 

The question naturally arises, why is there so 
great a difference? Why is one class of people 
bom into this world under such poor conditions 
that millions of them die in infancy because the 
abundance of the things of this world which would 
insure them life is denied them while another class 
has those things in abundance? Who is re- 
sponsible for these conditions? Why do these 
conditions exist? 

Man is responsible for these conditions. And 
they exist because of man's inhumanity to man, — 
because of man's selfishness and greed. If every- 
body in this world would make his living by his 



PREFACE 

own labor without in any way getting anything 
of the product of the labor of his fellow man or 
woman, these conditions would not exist. The 
trouble is that man is inclined to get for himself 
the things which are his neighbors. All people, 
of course, are not alike, and some will say this does 
not apply to them. They will say they are hon- 
est and give everybody what is coming to him. 
That may be as it is. There are honest people, 
but there are times in everybody's life when he 
does not give in return a full equivalent. Some 
people will call an act of their own just, but would 
not think so if it were measured out to them. But 
the greatest factor, the one that causes most of the 
unjust conditions in this world, is the deliberate 
and inexcusable meanness of man to get what be- 
longs to his neighbor. By what right does any- 
body appropriate unto himself anything from 
anybody else without returning a full equivalent. 
Another method is to prevent a fellow man from 
gaining access to the things in this world which 
he needs to make his living and which were put into 
the world by an all-wise Creator for all alike, 
in that way exacting tribute of a fellow man, and 
making a living without working, — just working 
the other fellow. Man is created to make his 
living by his labor without in any way infring- 
ing upon the rights of anybody else. Infringe- 
ment upon others in any way, shape or form is 
stealing, whether legalized or not, whether sanc- 
tioned by custom or usage. This holds good be- 



PREFACE 

tween any two people, whether they be strangers 
or relatives, whether husband and wife, parent and 
child, brothers, sisters, — whoever they are. Of 
all animals, man is the only one that preys upon 
his own kind. In lower animal life we see one 
specie preying upon another, but they are not 
to blame, — they are created that way, while 
man is created in a class by himself, separate and 
distinct from all other animal life. Lower ani- 
mals can use only what is created, but man is 
capable of making things come his way. His up- 
right position of body, his gift of reasoning and 
of speech, puts him in a class by himself. But 
with all those valuable attributes, man of all the 
species is the only one that does not live true to 
its creation. He has degenerated, and badly at 
that. Not satisfied with those invaluable endow- 
ments which would make him the crowning cre- 
ation, he has to stoop so low, — prostituting his 
intellect and gift of speech, — as to invent the 
devil, hell fire and brimstone for nothing more than 
the subjugation of his fellow man. 

This is one class of people. Then again the 
tendency to live without working has created an- 
other class, — the lazy ones. Those two classes 
of drones throw the burden of the work of the 
world upon a third class which has to do all the 
work. Naturally, under such conditions there 
must be injustice. Again the why and wherefore 
of things begins to become the uppermost thought 
in the mind of the worker. Seize upon any exist- 



PREIB^ACE 

ing condition and the injustice of it will be ap- 
parent. Why, then, are things thus, and what 
is the remedy? This brings us to the creation 
or beginning of the world. I will try in the fol- 
lowing pages to give my views, and my hope is 
that this volume may be the means of awakening 
humanity to better existing conditions and create 
a world in which nothing but justice shall pre- 
vail. 



THE 
CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 



CHAPTER I 

It is apparent that some higher power or force 
than we on this earth know of is responsible for 
calling this universe into existence. Some call 
this power nature, others, possibly, something else, 
but we can see manifestations in all grades of 
life that each stage or grade of life has the feel- 
ing of mystery about a higher stage of life, till 
of the known grades of life man is the highest. 
And man has his ideas about a higher power, and 
the conceptions of this higher power in man are 
not constant but of many varieties and interpre- 
tations. A name is given to a Something by which 
it can be known and differentiated from other 
things. For our purpose this unknown power, 
this superhuman force, will be known in this work 
as God. God, then, is the creator of all the uni- 
verse. 

The question arises, for what purpose was this 
universe and all it contains created? We can see 
that man is the only active being on this earth ; all 
other things, by whatever name called, are passive 
and made only for man, whom God has destined 
to be his free agent on this earth and who has a 
definite place to fill which God has incorporated in 
his plan of creation. For this reason God has 



2 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

endowed man with the gift of speech and reason- 
ing. As there is a chasm between the amoeba and 
man, so is there a chasm between the mind of man 
and God. In other words, the amoeba is an or- 
ganism subject to the laws of life; it is born, lives 
and dies and is subject to the laws of nutrition 
during its life just as man is. The amoeba is the 
lowest form of animal life and man is the highest. 
There are millions of forms between the two. As 
low as the single cell amoeba is compared to the 
complex organism of man, so low down on the 
scale is the mind of man compared to God. But 
the mind is that medium which God has placed 
in man to be the factor through which that part 
of man which is his spark of godliness can be de- 
veloped so as to bridge the chasm and be the 
cause of man's rising to a plane on a level with 
God. That is God's plan, — to use man as his 
acre on which to grow something which shall in the 
end be like him. For that reason has he given 
man a mind. That is the only way whereby man 
can be created in the image of his Maker. Not 
in a bodily image as the preachers try to make 
us believe, — to believe that God has the shape of 
a human body is ridiculous. It is claimed that 
God is omnipresent. Just imagine such a God, 
shaped like a human body, spread all over the 
earth, — let alone all over the universe. Think 
it over and draw your own conclusions. 

Now if man would live true to his creation, all 
the misery we have in this world would never have 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 3 

come into existence. But instead of following 
the voice of his bosom and building upon it step 
by step to a finer and higher life, he allowed his 
baser feelings to possess him and the spark of 
godliness died out. Thus man sunk below the 
level of the lower animals, for they live true to 
creation and man does not. The depth to which 
man has fallen is amply illustrated in the present 
world war of extermination. Thus are the fruits 
of disobedience harvested. And people are alike 
all over the world, — read}^ to do the same thing 
when opportunity offers. Instead of making a 
blessing of their free agency, they turn it into a 
curse. 

You say, " Why did not God create man dif- 
ferently, so that he would have continued as he 
was created .? " The answer is that this very gift 
of reasoning is necessary for man to become God- 
like. It is reason, too, which puts man in a class 
by himself, apart from all other forms of animal 
life. If man were not free, he would be compelled, 
and compulsion is not freedom. God being free 
(he was not compelled by anybody to create the 
universe), he wanted man to be free. And to be- 
come Godlike man must give his consent. This 
is necessary for harmony. Unwilling and grum- 
bling people can not create a heaven. The stand- 
ard along which lines God created man is fully 
exemplified by the man Jesus Christ. True hu- 
manity loves its neighbor as it does itself; it does 
not murder him. 



4 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

Since man has fallen from the way in which 
God intended he should live, it follows that he 
must be converted back to God if he would realize 
to the full the promises which he was intended to 
become heir to. It all rests with man. If he is 
willing to obey, all is well ; if not, he has only him- 
self to blame. For the torture of his mind will 
be terrible if he realizes what he could be and 
what he is, in the next life. Our earthly life is 
just a step toward another conscious existence 
and if we have lost it, it is our own fault. God 
has implanted in the human breast and mind the 
knowledge which tells us what to do, and in the 
degree to which he has given us understanding 
will we be held accountable. 

We are born into this world without our con- 
sent and we leave it without our consent. 
We have no choice in the father we shall 
have, — millionaire or pauper. But we know that 
we must die, and the place we go to is of our own 
choice. We can find either riches or poverty in 
the next world, so to speak. We will get just 
what is coming to us, and the man who is a mil- 
lionaire on this earth can be a pauper in the next 
world. Just as we prepare ourselves for some 
calling in this world, — if we would be a lawyer, 
we go to a law school ; a doctor, to a medical col- 
lege ; a shoemaker, we go to a shoeshop ; a black- 
smith, to a blacksmith shop, and so on, — just so 
we can prepare ourselves for something in the 
next world. And we will be placed just where we 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 5 

belong, to do what we have trained ourselves for. 
We would not hire a tailor to make biscuits or a 
butcher to build aeroplanes. This earth is the 
shop where we learn our trade for the next world. 
Here we can find plenty of instructions and mate- 
rial to work with. God has given us immutable 
laws by which we can live and which will teach us 
his will if we will only obey them. We deal direct 
with God. There is no devil or anything else be- 
tween God and man. 

But man is conceited and when his little brain 
tells him what he should do, he forthwith becomes 
contrary. He also wants to get credit for some- 
thing he is not entitled to ; he thinks himself clever 
and wants to put one over on God. Never mind; 
you can not do it. It acts like a boomerang; it 
comes back home. 

This earth being the school where we learn our 
lessons, it behooves us to pay strict attention. 
We can see that certain principles hold good in 
all lines of endeavor, — in fact, they hold good 
everywhere, in all lands and among all people. 
Another lesson teaches us that a harvest comes 
not only in agriculture, but in everything. Those 
two things, — i.e., the certain principles and the 
harvest, — are man's greatest concern. 

The harvesting of man by God is on the same 
principle as the harvesting of grain by man. The 
soil is represented by man; the seed by the spark 
of godliness ; the wind, rain, storm, sunshine, hail, 
drouth, etc., by human proclivities ; the harvest 



6 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

by death; and the threshing by the awakening to 
the next conscious life. If the elements are favor- 
able, a crop is produced. If the seed succumbs to 
the elements, we have a crop failure. So also if 
the human proclivities are not overcome by the 
spark of godliness, we will have a crop failure for 
the life to come. Everything on the land is cut 
along with the gathering of the grain, and when 
it is threshed, is separated ; so, also, everyone dies 
and is separated and put in the class where he or 
she belongs. 

There is one difference, however, and that is 
this. Everything as we see it on this earth 
springs from a parent, owes its existence to a 
parent, must have a parent, — man included. The 
mission of the parent is to give life to the off- 
spring. The parent dies and the offspring contin- 
ues the life of the earth to become a parent in 
turn. Every offspring is influenced by the pa- 
rent. This is the order of things on earth and 
also pertains to the body of man. 

But the spark of godliness which is put in that 
body by God and is part of God and is given 
to man as life everlasting through which we be- 
come as God, — that spark is ours to keep, or re- 
ject by putting our proclivities in command over 
the spark. This spark, then, is the nucleus of 
our life hereafter and has no separate parent; 
each individual is his or her own parent in that 
sense. The laws of heredity do not apply here. 
You can be healthy, free from all taint and dis- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 7 

ease ; you are the controlling force. The only 
requirement is full, complete and unequivocal 
obedience. 

Man is willing to obey in a certain fashion after 
his own pleasure. This is evidenced by man's 
wanting a king or some other ruler. This is obe- 
dience with strings to it, and man feels important 
that he has made a king; but he plays a losing 
game. If we had obedience as we should obey, 
we would have no need for any king or other ruler. 
We would obey God and lead a life worth 100 per 
cent. 

" How can this life be led? " you say. " I 
have been so busy eking out my existence I have 
never had time or energy to think of anything 
but making my living. I have had no part in 
shaping affairs on this earth. It is the other 
fellow with time and money who is guilty." The 
rule for everybody is expressed by the word 
Christianity. Let Christianity reign and all is 
well. " What, then," you say, " is Christian- 
ity ? " We will explain that in the following 
pages. 



CHAPTER II 

As soon as there is more than one person on 
earth it becomes necessary to get up a code of 
ethics or rules and regulations. And if the num- 
ber of people increases considerably, these rules 
should be in writing. But, mark you, these rules 
should not be handed do^vn by some autocrat for 
his benefit, but should be formed so as not to do 
the slightest injury to even the least of the peo- 
ple. This fact prompted God to have the man 
Jesus Christ write a code of ethics, or, if you 
please, live a life just as God would have every 
man live it, so as to set an example before the 
world. 

You say, " Why did not God have him live from 
the beginning of time so that everybody might 
have the benefit of his example? " I will say that 
every man is created with the same potentialities 
as Christ, and if every man were to live alone on 
this earth without ever coming in contact with an- 
other human being, he would live his life in ac- 
cord with the plan of God, excepting only the 
propagation of the species. This one phase we 
will not touch upon just now. We simply want to 
show at this time that every man is all he was in- 
tended to be when he is all alone on this earth, so 
to speak. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 9 

The trouble commences as soon as he comes in 
contact with another man. Then he turns loose 
his lower passions. He wants to control and 
cheat and so forth. Those passions are strictly 
human and should be held under the control of the 
spark of godliness, and that is the task God has 
set for us to do. Every man has that feeling in 
his bosom; all he has to do is to obey. But that 
is the testing point ; he balks. He does not allow 
the voice of the bosom to control the thoughts of 
the mind. That is the point where all our misery 
originates. And there is practically no difference 
between any two people. In some the feelings are 
stronger, in some weaker, but they are there. 
Obey the voice of God and all is well. 

" Now, then," you say, " why does God allow 
this.f^ Why doesn't he or didn't he make man so 
he would obey him? " Because that would be 
forcing him, and God does not want to use force 
in that way. He wants man to act on his human 
impulses and put them under God's will voluntar- 
ily. That is the only way to have a free man, to 
be wholly and willingly and without reservation 
God's friend, or whatever you may want to call it, 
much in the same way as you want a true and 
tried friend. He does not have to be under your 
will or control, but he puts himself there volun- 
tarily, and of his own free will does things that 
you would never ask of him to do were he your 
paid servant or slave, and that you could not make 
him do were you to use force even were you in 



10 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

a position to take his life if he refused. God 
having put into man all that is needed to make 
himself like God if he only chose, he abused his 
liberty and strayed away from God. God, know- 
ing the outcome, let him have his own will, as on 
that free will rests the whole plan. God knew 
that in order to have man become Godlike it had 
to be developed in man by man's consciousness and 
free will. This holds good for the individual as 
well as for nations and generations. Man is only 
the unit of the nation and generation. Letting 
man have his way long enough will finally convince 
him that he cannot come out right by his way and 
that God's way is the only right one. This ap- 
plies not only to the individual but to the nations 
and generations alike, as, for example, man begins 
to learn as a child and keeps on till death. Na- 
tions learn in the same way and so do generations. 
To make it clearer, think of one man's life from 
birth to death, his trials and learnings ; then of 
nations from the first man of that nation until 
that nation ceases to exist; and of generations 
all over the world from the beginning till the world 
is no more. They go through the same meta- 
morphosis, as nations and generations depend for 
their existence upon that one unit, man. 

Now all this is the logical result of man's dis- 
obedience. If he did not disobey, it would not 
be this way. All this learning, these trials and so 
forth would never have been, because God had im- 
planted in man all the results of all of this and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 11 

gave him for his guide that spark of godliness 
which would ring if man wanted to do something 
which was wrong. But it only rang, and did not 
hurt him, and he did not heed. If it had hit him 
like a club and knocked him down, he would have 
noticed. But God wanted it to be gentle, for he 
knew that by gentleness alone would his plan come 
out right. We can see this proven almost daily. 
When fear loses its grip man is as bad or worse 
than ever. It is only when he is bound by that 
fear that he willingly (?) obeys. This terrible, 
insane, worse-than-butchering European war gives 
us another example of force doing nothing for the 
good of the world, showing that this knock-down 
is not the proper channel to follow. At first peo- 
ple gasped at the frightful affair; now it is so 
common they can joke about it. 

Fear and force are like unto man ; they are born 
to die. But love is like the sun ; by giving, it cre- 
ates or grows bigger. God, knowing all this, let 
man have his way until he became conscious he 
could not continue that way. And man, having 
so long disobeyed, had forgotten about the voice 
of his bosom; the human elements had killed the 
seed of godliness ; it did not ring any more. So 
God gave them a man who did live a life in ac- 
cordance with God's will, that they might see and 
remember. But no sooner did Christ appear than 
they wanted to kill him. The human thoughts 
were again master. And so it is till this day. 

Now as long as people do not want to obey their 



12 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

own voice, because they get it without any effort 
on their part ( and in order to value anything they 
want to go through hardships), and some by 
heredity and environment have not received this 
spark in a very viable form, God established 
through Christ the code of ethics which we call 
Christianity. The principle of Christianity is 
this : Love God above all else and thy neighbor 
as thyself. That is all there is to Christianity. 
It is short and simple. 

But people will not do it. They have estab- 
lished a Christianity of their own making and they 
call it religion. They worship their religion and 
call it Christianity. For in order to live a Chris- 
tian life you must obey God, and with their re- 
ligion they can make themselves believe they can 
make God obey them. They all have a religion 
that suits their purpose. Again I will refer to 
this monstrous crime of war raging just now, 
each nation praying to God to help her kill the 
other fellow. And no nation is exempt. Our own 
United States of America is even worse than any 
of the European nations now engaged in the war 
in that it has appropriated for army and navy 
purposes more money in one year than any one of 
the same European powers has for the same length 
of time, in times of peace before this war started. 
Religion will allow those things, but Christianity 
never. Religion as it is in vogue to-day and has 
been practiced from the beginning stands for a 
system of master and servant. Such is not Chris- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 13 

tianity. Christianity is service to your neighbor ; 
but not in the sense as it exists, — not to make 
your less fortunate brother your slave, not to 
take any advantage for whatever reason or under 
any condition over anybody. Religion allows you 
to take advantage in any shape, Christianity 
never. Christianity helps the ignorant. Religion 
takes advantage of them. 

If all nominal Christians were converted accord- 
ing to Christianity, we would have only one body 
of Christians instead of all the different sects. 
But 99%, and probably %o of the remaining 1%, 
are not converted in accordance with Christianity. 
They are converted according to the doctrines and 
dogmas of their respective churches. That is the 
reason we have this pseudo-Christianity existing 
in the world to-day. Study these so-called Chris- 
tians in the different parts of the world or the 
different denominations in a certain community 
and you will find that so. Each class has a differ- 
ent conception of Christianity. A group of peo- 
ple find themselves together with a basis of their 
own standard of Christianity for a foundation and 
then they work along the lines of what they would 
like Christianity to be, never once thinking that 
they are working their ideals instead of the Chris- 
tianity of Christ. 

There is only one standard of Christianity, and 
that standard is the standard of Christ Jesus. 
All others are false, even though people defending 
them m.ay do so in a sincere belief that they are 



14* THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

doing it according to Christ Jesus. Christianity 
is the same at all times and anywhere in the world. 
But take your Christians of one kind and try to 
have them mingle with another kind of Christians 
and in the majority of cases they cannot get along 
together. There will be dissensions, disagree- 
ments, quarrels, fights, — even murder and war, — 
all because one kind of Christianity does not agree 
with another kind. This is a sad state of affairs, 
but true, and it proves that nominal Christians 
have a Christianity born of their own flesh. If it 
were the Christianity of Christ Jesus, that friction 
would not and could not exist ; instead there would 
be universal love. 

It is palpable that hate to a strong degree exists 
between Christians so-called. They cannot agree 
on earth, still they are serving the same 
God and want to share the same heaven. 
Here on earth they draw race lines and geograph- 
ical lines, with the intention of getting the best of 
the other fellow, and then when they die expect 
to wake up and find themselves living in peace and 
harmony with their enemies. That will not work. 
We are our own builders and what we erect we will 
get in the next world. If the lion and the lamb 
shall sleep together, you first must train them to 
it. If the cat and the mouse shall walk together 
in love and peace, you must convert them; other- 
wise the mouse will do her walking inside the cat. 

These illustrations are identical with Christian- 
ity as it exists to-day, — one Christian nation try- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 15 

ing to eat up the other, one Christian denomina- 
tion trying to exterminate the other. And then 
they expect the kingdom of heaven ! It is impossi- 
ble. If a contractor wanted to build and his men 
would not work in harmony, he could never finish 
that building. If one set of men tore down what 
the other set had built, or weakened some parts, 
put in poor material, etc., that building would be 
doomed. So it is with the house of God. It will 
consist only of the material put in and be in 
strength according to the material put in. 

Now if the material above described be used, it 
is easy to see that it must fall. It cannot be built 
of Christianity fashioned after mankind, but must 
be built of the Christianity ordained by God. 
And any Christianity which is not according to 
God's rules will not be used as material in the 
building. Mistake not; God is the overseer, and 
you cannot deliver anything that does not come up 
to specifications. God builds safe and thuswise 
that nothing will contain a flaw. Size up existing 
Christianity and you will see that it falls way 
short; therefore Christianity as it exists here on 
earth cannot be used as material. Christianity 
has been commercialized; it has gone through a 
metamorphosis. It has put on a new gown. Any 
Christianity that does not conform to commercial- 
ism is not acceptable nowadays. All Christianity 
to-day is promulgated from the basis of commer- 
ciaHsm. Is it any wonder no progress is made.^^ 
How can a thing prosper and be strong if it rests 



16 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

on a foundation not in accord with the superstruc- 
ture ? 

If Christianity had been taught as Jesus taught 
it to this time, we should have so much evidence 
of Christianity on hand that every child could 
notice it. Instead of that, all are agreed that the 
world is growing worse. The world is not grow- 
ing worse, but the people in it. Why? Because 
we have not Christianity. We have the meta- 
phoric kind, commercialized, — the very opposite 
of Christianity, called religion. Yes, that is the 
term, — religion. Of religions we find many in the 
world to-day, each one adapted to the purpose it 
must serve. But of Christianity there is but one 
and only one. Christianity is the same at all 
times ; it remains unchanged. By Christianity 
every one is treated alike. Anybody handing out 
Christianity can exchange places with the one he 
has dealings with and have the same principle ap- 
plied to himself that he is dealing out. That is 
the test of Christianity, to reverse unflinchingly. 
But in business religion it is the opposite. Re- 
ligion allows you to make a profit of thousands of 
dollars, or by man-made laws oppress your fel- 
low being (your brother, — your brother in God) ; 
to make him a slave, a murderer (as in war) and 
what not. All can see the oppression and in- 
justice on every hand, — and all in the name of 
religion, but never in the name of Christianity. 
The Old Testament is full of religion, and see 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 17 

what horrible bloodshed was perpetrated in its 
name. 

Christ came to change all this and left us Chris- 
tianity instead of religion. But no sooner was 
Christianity offered than people set to work to 
mould it to suit their purposes. Instead of re- 
ceiving it with joy and changing their sinful in- 
clinations to conform with Christianity, they 
moved heaven and earth to alter Christianity into 
a hybrid. And it was comparatively easy to do 
this, for the inclinations of most people were to- 
wards evil. People were bad when Christ was 
bom ; that's why God sent him to stay them. The 
few good of heart that did adopt Christianity were 
persecuted, slain and harassed, subdued by all the 
pressure that could be brought to bear on them. 
Murder was one of the agents of importance. Is 
it any wonder that the few fell before the many? 
Though the few felt the injustice and knew the 
wrong that was heaped upon them, yet they were 
powerless to resist successfully. Is it any wonder 
that under those circumstances Christianity lost 
out? With such conditions to start with and 
fondly nursed along those lines to the present day, 
what else can we have but the mock Christianity 
that exists to-day. 

Man is pretty shrewd and can accomplish 
wonderful things. The trouble is that his energy 
is directed along human lines and not along the 
lines God wants. If Christianity had been nursed 



18 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

from the time of Christ till the present just as 
Christ taught it, we should have a condition exist- 
ing to-day which would be little short of ideal. 
On the other hand we have conditions that are a 
shame to any civilized people. All manner of evils 
are rampant and winked at. A good person al- 
most has no place in this world. Surely the 
v/orld is growing worse instead of better. Almost 
everybody will acknowledge that, and nobody 
seems to know the remedy. The remedy lies in 
giving Christianity its rightful place and dis- 
carding the substituted religion. Christianity is 
taught falsely, and probably never has been taught 
along Christian lines with the exception of the 
time when Jesus lived and a short time thereafter. 
Nowadays it is a sham. It is handling shadow 
instead of substance. And you cannot move the 
object by its shadow. That is impossible. You 
must have the object first and then you may have 
the shadow. 

The way Christianity is taught nowadays is 
on the same principle as baking the bread first 
and then getting the flour afterwards. You know 
you cannot live on bread like that. You must first 
have flour and then you can have bread. Or a 
farmer selling a load of wheat without having 
raised any. In order to realize on a load of wheat 
he must first raise it. Or a child passing an ex- 
amination on school subjects without having gone 
to school and studied these subjects. The child 
must study those subjects and know and under- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 19 

stand them before it can pass a satisfactory ex- 
amination thereon. Just so with Christianity. 
The earth is everybody's school and in that school 
we have the lessons of Christianity. And in order 
to pass our examination for heaven we must on 
earth study those lessons, understand them and 
put them into practice on earth so as to become 
familiar with the work. For if we don't do the 
work and keep practicing, we forget, as you all 
know from experience from the work you are en- 
gaged in here on earth. 

The teaching of Christianity in general nowaT 
days keeps your attention on results and not on 
the things that go to make results. Take the 
farmer if he were to spend his time figuring how 
many loads of grain he would sell, how many bush- 
els to the load, what he would do with the money 
afterwards, etc., instead of actually working at 
raising grain without a thought of sale, just 
simply doing his best to raise the most and best 
and then after harvest have the grain to sell. Is 
it not plain to see which is the proper way.'^ 

Consider the teachings of Christianity as com- 
pared with practiced Christianity. Do you see 
Christianity put into practice .^^ I think not. In- 
stead we have a system of oppression, subjugation, 
serfdom. We are not living a life of love : " Do 
unto others as you would have others do unto 
you." " Love thy neighbor as thyself." Instead 
we do others. You notice all around you the 
game of doing the other fellow. Unless we profit 



20 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

by the other fellow, we cannot make our living. 
Christianity teaches that we shall be serving if 
we want to be great, not in the sense of inferiority 
but in the sense of a superior serving the inferior, 
having ourselves enough and letting others have, 
not using our superiority as a means of subju- 
gating our fellow beings, but using it gratefully, 
giving freely to others. Thereby we are gaining 
instead of losing. Just as the sun spends freely 
of its life giving energy so shall we be, and not like 
the shadow Christian who makes millions of dol- 
lars out of coal for himself when the consumers 
can hardly afford to buy it. God made the coal 
for all of us, not for one man or a few to get 
rich on at the expense of others. I do not blame 
the individual, the man who sells the coal ; I only 
cite this to show that we are not living as Chris- 
tians, for in our line of business we are doing the 
same thing. You see, business depends upon that 
profit and therefore Christianity and business are 
as incompatible as gunpowder and fire. " Love 
th}^ neighbor as thyself." If you did that, you 
would take no profit from him, as you claim the 
gain is yours ; reverse that, give an amount equal 
to what you take for your profit to your neighbor, 
for as a Christian you should do unto others as 
you would have others do unto you. 

Why do you suppose Christ drove the vendors 
and money changers out of the temple.'' They 
were doing business, — that was the reason ; they 
were trying to make people believe that that was 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 21 

a Christian principle; they had the audacity to 
go into the temple, intending to fool the people 
thereby because of the holiness attached to the 
temple. The people could be fooled, because if it 
was done in the temple, it would look as if it must 
be good, for surely nobody would do anything bad 
in the temple. Then Christ drove them out and 
told them they made a murder den of the temple. 

The same holds true to-day of the manner in 
which Christianity is taught. Instead of teach- 
ing the real thing, substitutes are delivered. The 
Pharisees and learned men of Christ's time are still 
with us. They who think they are the best Chris- 
tians are the ones most bitterly opposed to genuine 
Christianity. They pray " Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," and 
then go right on making slaves of their fellow men. 
Why and in what way? By business. The funda- 
mentals of business and the fundamentals of Chris- 
tianity are opposites. That is one fact you can- 
not get around. Business claims a profit, some- 
thing unearned, something for which no equivalent 
in value is returned, some transaction whereby one 
party attaches some of the other parties value to 
himself without giving that amount in return, — a 
surplus, a profit, if you please. Now for every 
value labor had to be expended. Without labor 
there is no value. Therefore it is easy to see 
that you must through your labor give an equal 
value in return. " Do unto others as you would 
have others do unto you." Don't you see, if you 



Sa THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

gave as much as you received, business would die 
a natural death? Why be so inconsistent. You 
claim the profit for yourself. Why don't you 
give it to your neighbor? If it is right for you to 
take profit and if it constitutes justice, why not 
give it all to the other man instead of claiming it 
for yourself? That transaction, according to 
your conception, is right; then why is it you al- 
ways insist that the big end shall come your way 
and not turn it to your fellow? If it is right, 
let the other man have it ; that would be logical. 
You claim to be just. Then why don't you act 
accordingly? You surely are not weakminded, 
that you don't know any better. You always 
seem to recognize what you want ; that shows you 
are not insane. So long as you are not insane, so 
long as you can determine what is to your best 
advantage, — and that advantage lies in getting 
the best of the other fellow, getting for yourself 
something for which you return no value, — but 
one deduction is left and that is that you are dis- 
honest. No matter what excuses you offer or 
whom you blame (as Adam blamed Eve), you are 
not acting in a Christian spirit. 



CHAPTER III 

Since man has fallen away from the ways God 
set out for him to follow, he must be converted 
back to God because God created man the highest 
in the order of creation and to be like him. That 
means that God put the potentials into man, but 
man must recognize the why and wherefore of it 
and then use his free will to work towards that 
goal. God wants no slaves, but free men. 

In order to be united inseparably to something, 
it must contain those things which seem to you the 
only things worth while and which are the result 
of your highest ambitions. It must not be forced 
upon you, but you yourself must work for it. 
Otherwise it loses its value. You may give a per- 
son something of great value; the recipient may 
keep it for some time and then tire of it and give 
it away ; it loses its value for him. Anything in 
this world that is valuable has a different inter- 
pretation put upon it by different persons. The 
most valuable things, things that are well nigh 
indispensable, have been squandered and are being 
squandered daily. And God could not make man 
like himself for that reason; it is too precious a 
privilege to be like God to be acquired thus easily 

and as easily thrown to the winds at some con- 

23 



24f THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

venient time. Therefore God made man human, 
but put the seed of godliness in him. 

Now, then, if it is worth while for you to own 
godliness, work for it. Cultivate the seed and you 
get just what you plant. It is your own and you 
cannot blame anybody if it is not to your liking. 
God gives you knowledge and everything you need ; 
all you have to do is to work. Put your labor 
against God's capital and the profits will be di- 
vided equally. 

Of course you must comply with the standards 
set by God, every man to his ability and under- 
standing as God gives him. When you do that 
you are converted. Then after conversion the 
real work begins. Just as planting the seed wheat 
is only one of the first steps towards a harvest of 
wheat and flour and bread, so is conversion only 
the beginning of the higher life ; you must still 
work for the finish. Man is likened unto the seed 
of wheat. The seed is placed in well prepared 
ground; it sprouts and grows. Rain and wind 
make it unpleasant for it, but they are necessary 
for its growth. It gets sunshine also, and then 
the harvest, providing the hailstorm does not 
destroy it. So it is with man. Man is the well 
prepared ground, prepared by the Creator. The 
seed of godliness is planted in man, and for rain, 
wind and sunshine we have the better human quali- 
ties, the inborn instructions God gives to man, the 
understanding of God's will and the ability to do 
it if we only will. That is sunshine enough, and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST S5 

all is well until some day man comes along with 
his baser humanity and hails it out. Such a per- 
son is not converted. The converted person is 
always obedient to the will of God and builds as 
God gives him material. If rain or storm pre- 
vails, he does not give up, but realizes in those 
unpleasant (to him) conditions a tonic, a 
strengthener, a trial, to prove if he is worthy or 
just a hanger-on as long as all goes well. As you 
must make mistakes before you become proficient, 
as you must forget so often before you finally re- 
member a thing, just so must those trials and 
temptations be stepping stones. 

Life gives you a fine example. Watch a child 
grow up. Watch his conceptions of things at 
different ages and the processes of reasoning em- 
ployed by the child at different ages. The pro- 
cess is in stages. Every few years he employs a 
different method, even though in accordance with 
his environment and ability. This change will not 
be so marked in later years, but up to 21 to 
25 years of age there is a marked difference every 
two or three years. The child, being the son of 
his father, comes to the conclusion that he knows 
a whole lot about his father's business and is 
ofttimes angered when told that his views are not 
acceptable. He even thinks he knows better than 
father or mother. Later in life he sees that he 
was wrong. You see, father is running the ship 
and his orders must be obeyed otherwise you would 
land in a whirlpool. The child is bom in the 



m THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

image of the father, but is not fully developed ; he 
has to learn first. 

So it is with our relation to our heavenly 
Father. We are born in his image and our con- 
version is our second birth, simply signifying 
willingness to obey every will of our Creator. 
Then we must learn as we have the light. And we 
learn to a certain stage. Then either people get 
lazy and refuse to learn any more, or some learn 
and use that knowledge to their own advantage, 
thereby embezzling. Some use it as a club over 
their fellow men, thus gaining temporarily and 
losing the heavenly chances ; some use it for their 
own aggrandizement, playing a kind of God them- 
selves ; they want to be shining lights and thereby 
become a traitor to their trust. One stops at 
this stage, another at another ; one for this reason, 
another for another; but all tending to disown 
our heavenly Father, leaving his home and be- 
coming a boarder at some other place. For that 
reason Christianity as it is practiced is a farce. 
There are too few that stick it out to the end. 
The majority sell out for a price at some time. 
They are boarding for a price and not putting 
that money into their own homes. Conversion as 
it exists to-day is not conversion to Christianity 
but conversion to humanity. 

Normally, man's actions and thoughts are 
guided by two forces. One force may be called 
instinct, intuition or nature, the other force is 
produced by deliberation. Usually man lives by 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 27 

the former, and while it is true that he uses his 
mind, the majority use it only in a subordinate 
capacity. Then in a revival meeting he is told 
a number of times how bad he is (mind starts to 
work), and that fact is forced upon his attention 
continually and forcibly until his mind awakens. 
He becomes aware of a certain feeling. That feel- 
ing, he has been told, constitutes conversion and 
he believes it, when in fact it is only the awaken^ 
mg of the better human nature. But he thinks he 
is converted to God, and after this so-called con- 
version his efforts are directed accordingly. 

If it were a real conversion to Christianity, all 
would be well; but it is only humanity. A man 
thus awakened may improve in character, and 
some do, but nevertheless it is not Christianity. 
And it is proven all about you. Those so con- 
verted will always judge things Christian from 
their viewpoint and conform Christianity to 
their views instead of making their views conform 
to Christianity. That kind of conversion allows 
a man to take advantage of his neighbor in all the 
different ways you see in existence to-day. This 
is what makes people say, " He wants to be a 
Christian ; look this and that and the other ! " 
They fail to realize that the conversion such a 
man claims is not conversion to Christianity but to 
humanity. You find among those converted peo- 
ple as much of the evil which is practiced in the 
world as among those which claim no conversion. 
Nay, one thing is certain; you find more hypo- 



S8 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

crites, because such a man wants to be something 
he is not, whereas the other man does not have to 
try to uphold any standard which is foreign to his 
nature. He passes for what he is, and thus is 
more honest. Furthermore, in the majority of 
cases you must watch those converted fellows more 
than the others, for you do not know whether they 
are labelled correctly, whereas the other fellow 
is labelled just what he is, and you have no ex- 
cuse to offer if he beats you for you knew his 
standing. But under the guise of religion more 
dirty work is being done than is generally realized. 
Conversion, as practiced to-day, does not guar- 
antee you that such a man is Christlike. He will 
use the same weapons to get the better of you as 
any so-called worldly man, at least the same prin- 
ciple is involved, and that principle is as different 
from Christ's principle as night is from day. 
Therefore you have no conversion to Christianity. 
The principle of Christianity is altruistic and the 
principle of conversion as practiced in the world 
is subjugation. 

I am not condemning conversion as practiced 
to-day. It has some good features, for it makes 
some men better; those same men might have 
grown worse than they were. Others, again, are 
scared into being good, who might have developed 
into really bad characters if it had not been for 
the fear of hell. But a very large part of the 
people are repulsed by the fruits of such conver- 
sion. To be good for the sake of Good (God) is 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 29 

better, and those people can be trusted further 
than the others. This so-called conversion is the 
best the clergy offer, and people are not so much 
to blame for not having the real Christian conver- 
sion as they depend upon the clergy to teach them 
the right kind. People are busy making their liv- 
ing; it takes all their time and energy to make 
their living ; but the clergy have nothing else to do, 
or at least should have nothing else to do, except 
to study so as to bring in their flock, — in fact, 
they have more business than a Rockefeller or Car- 
negie. People are busy making their living and 
that of the clergy besides. This leaves the clergy 
free to study, — to find the way to heaven, — and 
for their support from the people they are to give 
in return to the people the knowledge which will 
bring them to heaven. Instead of that, the clergy 
give the people a counterfeit. They get their liv- 
ing for nothing. They do not give value for 
value, and so their acts are not Christlike. They 
work on principle of human conversion. 

There are honest preachers, men who speak 
from sincerest conviction, but who are themselves 
misled. They are taught wrong. They are 
taught certain principles and made to believe that 
these principles are the right ones. Being thus 
taught, they strain every nerve to incorporate 
that teaching into their minds and thus become 
participants in spreading the gospel falsely. For 
example, compare the teachings of the different 
sects, or Protestant and Catholic. Each will be- 



30 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

lieve the teachings of its kind and not the other. 
Each will fight to maintain that it is right, the 
other wrong. E'ach will spread its particular 
teachings, — and surely they can't all be right 
as the teachings are different. Fortunate is the 
person who grows up under no dogma or doctrine 
of any church, but who gets his lessons from God 
by obeying the voice of his bosom. Religion has 
been commercialized and has descended to a very 
low level. 

Christians, so-called or self-styled, say, " What 
you are talking about will never take place on this 
earth. Such conditions can never exist on earth. 
You have things turned around; that is the way 
it will be in heaven. You cannot change the 
people; it was always thus." They even tell you 
people are growing worse, that it was never as 
bad as now. Just note the inconsistency. They 
claim that by their observance of their religious 
rites they are better than others ; that their reli- 
gion helps them to resist temptation; that they 
are doing things which are pleasing to God. 
They claim that if everybody lived a religious life 
we would have a better world. They claim that 
by conversion they are improved, made better 
people; that they are taken out of a lower state 
of morality and put into a higher one. In fact, 
they claim improvement in everything, — in all 
their actions, thoughts and words. Now, then, if 
that is the case why can't you change people.? 
Have not these people admitted that they are 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 31 

made better? Then it follows that we should 
have had improvement all through the ages. 

But I agree with them that the people are 
growing worse instead of better. More deception 
is practiced nowadays than ever before, more 
openly and brazenly. The reason is that people 
are learning that Christianity has been substi- 
tuted by religion. If Christianity should be 
taught, it would grow, as anything in nature 
does, and would be spread all over the world, 
visible to the most ignorant. But, Christianity, 
where art thou.'^ Christianity will improve peo- 
ple and keep them improving right along, but 
religion can't. Religion just causes a sham im- 
provement, a shadow instead of the object. The 
flame rises to die again, appears only to vanish. 
Christianity, on the other hand, is like time ; it is 
always growing, always adding, — not an upstart 
which vanishes after a short existence, but, like 
the seconds and minutes, there is no turn back- 
wards. 

How unreasonable to say we will have Chris- 
tianity in heaven when we don't grow the material 
for it here on earth and send it to heaven to have 
it to build with. Can anything be more foolish? 
We all know that like begets like, and " as ye sow 
so shall ye reap " ; you can get only what you 
labor for. How, then, can you build up Chris- 
tianity out of such hostile material as is sent up 
from this earth? All so-called Christians are en- 
vious of one another, not one individual against 



32 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

another individual so much as congregation 
against congregation. One denomination works 
against the other denomination, trying to get 
people to join their church. They even go so 
far as to create hatred in the minds of their mem- 
bers against church members of another denom- 
ination, sneering at their belief. Ministers try to 
create strained feelings for fear of losing mem- 
bers. If Christianity prevailed, we should live as 
in Eph. 4 : 4-6, " There is one body, and one 
spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your 
calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one 
God and Father of all, who is above all and 
through all, and in you all." How beautiful that 
sounds. There would be one church body, namely, 
Christians ; all others would be eliminated. One 
Spirit — the spirit of love and good-will towards 
our fellow man, and the one hope of our calling 
would be to work for our fellow man so that every 
one would be saved. One Lord, one faith, etc., — 
established and geographical lines would vanish 
from the earth, racial hatred would be no more. 
There would be one brotherhood, including every 
nation on earth, and God the Father of them all. 
Then can we truly pray, " Thy Kingdom come, 
thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven." 
But now it is mockery to pray that. For usually 
those who pray the loudest, " Thy kingdom 
come " are the ones who are oppressing the coun- 
try the worst, are the ones who prosper in a ma- 
terial way by the sweat and blood of their fellow 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 33 

beings. Those same fellows, if they thought 
God's kingdom would be a reality on this earth, 
would drop dead at the first signs of it. 

There is " one body and one spirit " would 
mean that there would be no more war ! ! ! War 
is the expression of feeling that one body of reli- 
gious people within certain geographical lines, 
established by them in no Christian spirit, have 
against another people in another geographical 
limit. If their lines extended to include the other 
body, there would be no war. Now let us extend 
that throughout the whole earth according to the 
above quoted verse, doing away with all geo- 
graphical limits, and use the free earth God gave 
us for use instead of exploitation, and the king- 
dom of God would be established. 

But shrewd and unscrupulous men have substi- 
tuted religion for Christianity to further their 
own selfish ends. And people as a rule just ac- 
cept things as they are made to appear ; those who 
do see the wrong will not come out with the truth 
because they can, as they think, make an easier 
living. If some honest man raises his protest, he 
is crucified ; that settles him. That is why religion 
seems such a puzzle, and well it may puzzle people 
as it is the shrewdest work the sum total of human 
deception has conceived. 

In contrast with religion Christianity is as easy 
as a. b. c. Religion works for good and evil, 
Christianity for good only. Religion is produc- 
tive of lies, deceit, confusion, enmity, murder. 



M THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

war, etc. ; Christianity never. Under Christian- 
ity you love your neighbor as yourself, and you 
would not do anything detrimental to yourself; 
but your religion allows you to do most anything 
to your fellow being. Just look about you and 
see the suffering and the inhumanity to man that 
religion tolerates. Wake up from your lethargy 
and use the brain God has given you. You have 
quantity and quality enough but you are not 
using it as you should. Throw away your doc- 
trines and dogmas and accept Christianity. In- 
stead of just joining a church and attending it 
habitually or because it is the custom, join 
Christ. Your church will not save you ; your 
brethren will not save you ; your minister will not 
save you. You must work out your own salva- 
tion, and Christianity is the only thing that will 
help you do it. Join the church of Christ and 
help spread the gospel of Christianity. Too 
many join a church or grow up in a church or- 
ganization and do their level best to study the 
doctrines of that church, thinking they are Chris- 
tians. And all the while they do not apply what 
they know; they are simply being led, sometimes 
by misinformed people who grew up misled them- 
selves, sometimes by people who know better, but 
who think it is to their advantage to promulgate 
false doctrine. Still, any thinking person can 
soon find out for himself that we have not applied 
Christianity in this world. 

Why, then, is it that we have not more people 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 35 

or for that matter all people standing for Christ 
and Christianity? The reasons are many. 
Start with the Bible record of man's creation. 
God created him perfect, without sin, but with 
the faculty to sin or not to sin, for God wanted 
man to be a free moral agent, free to do as he 
chose within the limits God saw fit to set him. 
God's plan was not man's plan, and therefore he 
put him on his honor, because it was ordained by 
God that man should be like himself. Now in 
order to have a share in the kingdom of heaven 
we must do something, and all God required of 
man was obedience. He told him he was free to 
do as he pleased, but one voice would tell him 
when he had reached his limit. That voice is 
plain and unmistakable. But man thought he 
could beat God and disobeyed. And that is really 
the sum substance of all the bad in the world, — 
disobedience to God. If every person in the 
world would obey God's laws, we would have the 
kingdom of heaven on earth, and God's will would 
be done on earth. A person does not value any- 
thing unless he has a share in the creating of it, — 
at least he does not value it so highly as a thing 
he had a share in creating. Take such good 
things as health, happiness, sunshine, etc. ; they 
have not the same value to many as some miser- 
able material property they accumulated. God 
knew the disposition of men and wanted to give 
them a chance to help create the kingdom of 
heaven, which was the only sane way to insure 



36 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

eternal peace. Being of their own making, they 
would be satisfied with it, and would have no one 
to blame if it was not to their liking. The same 
rule holds good with regard to all our temporal 
acts. 

Of course there are exceptions to all rules, but 
the exceptions only prove the rule. A mother 
may so far forget herself as to kill her own child 
for one reason or another, but that does not dis- 
prove the rule of mother love. Without mother 
love few children would be raised, for you could 
not hire a person for money to do what the mother 
does. She may be tired unto death from taking 
care of an unruly infant, and in her despair may 
lay it down and say hard things about it, and if 
she were hired she would quit the job, but her 
mother love exerts itself, and though hardly able 
to because of fatigue, she huddles it to her breast 
again. That mother love, oh, how beautiful! 
That is the principle underlying the kingdom of 
heaven. Because we are the mother of it, we can- 
not go back on it ; we cannot disown it. 

Somebody will say, " That does not concern 
me; that was meant for Adam." I want to tell 
you, my friend, that it was not meant for the 
Bible Adam alone. That incident is given us as 
an example, and every person, male or female, 
young or old, is meant by it. The name Adam is 
used figuratively as, practically, we are all alike. 
Put in the same place, we would do the same thing 
far we have proven it to this date. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 37 

God gave us power to rule the earth, — we were 
absolute rulers over the earth and all it con- 
tained, — but as human beings we had obligations 
to one another. There was to be no limit to our 
freedom as long as we kept within the mark set 
by God. God kept his word, but we didn't. God 
will not interfere until we overstep his mark, and 
then only enough to keep us from overthrowing 
his plan. There is a long range in our freedom 
of action and that makes it sometimes or ofttimes 
appear that there is no God. But you must not 
lose sight of the fact that this is a human world, 
subject to human rulings, and that those seeming 
wrongs are a blessing in disguise. Those are 
the things that sharpen our wits. Those are the 
letters of the alphabet of humanity. You could 
not read without knowing the alphabet, and how 
can you read God's will in the school of life with- 
out the alphabet of humanity? 

If you were to take a walk in a city you would 
be guided by the buildings, corners of blocks, 
streets, etc., in finding your way. If in a settled 
rural community, you would have section lines, 
section corners, trails, etc., to lead you to your 
destination. In a wild open country you would 
have some mark of prominence, as hill, slope, 
river, etc., as your guide. And those things are 
so common to every person in their locality that 
they think little about it. But take all the land- 
marks away and how would you find your way.^* 
The same holds good in the journey through life; 



38 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

take away all those unchristian conditions and 
you would have nothing from which to learn. 
The very schooling which would give you your 
knowledge and establish your independence would 
be gone. By meeting those conditions in life and 
applying our judgment we can tell whether they 
are Christian or not. That is a blessing instead 
of the curse it looks to be. Even though such a 
condition be as old as the hills and practiced by 
religious people or the government of the country, 
if God tells you it is unchristian, it is so. There 
then, is your chance to prove whether you are of 
God or still to disobey him. To obey God and 
come in conflict with a condition that may be as 
old as the world, a condition that is upheld by re- 
ligion and government, is no small task. It may 
mean to you the loss of good-will and friendship 
of your friends. You may lose your position, 
or if you are in business, you may lose customers ; 
your former friends may turn profitable enter- 
prises from you ; your own family may make life 
unpleasant for you ; and all those things are hard 
to bear. But when God calls you, follow him. I 
don't mean to say that you must thoughtlessly 
disregard everybody's opinion, but let not any of 
those pressures sever you from your God. Be 
wise as the serpent and without fault as the dove, 
and your God will show you the way out. 
" What does it profit a man though he gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul? " Everything 
that we hold dear in this world is included in that 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 39 

term, " the whole world " : family ties, — father, 
mother, sisters, brothers, wife, children, — good 
business, comfortable home and money. Those 
things we all value highly, — some more, some less, 
— but we should rather lose them than our God. 
Make no mistake; valuable as those things are, 
God is of more importance. 



CHAPTER IV 

In a previous chapter it was stated that it was 
necessary for people to have a code of ethics, — 
a guide book, if you please, containing the rules 
and regulations to govern the intercourse of a 
people. This necessity led to the introduction of 
such a book in almost all nations. These books, 
of which the Bible is our representative, have not 
the same contents, but each one is written accord- 
ing to the seeming necessity of the people for 
whom it was written. The basis on which the 
books are written is the recognition of a higher 
power and the realization that man was destined 
for a future life. Man's corruption was also 
realized to be the stumbling block to this realiza- 
tion. Therefore men at different times in the 
growing of the world have written these books 
for a standard. In this way we have come to 
have our book, called the Bible, which is supposed 
to tell us all about the next life as well as to 
give us the rules for the treatment of our fellow 
man. 

There are some fine truths in the Bible, but, 
alas ! also some untruths. And the greatest pity 
of it is that the clergy are so utterly misinter- 
preting it, thereby causing a wrong impression in 

40 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 41 

the minds of the people. The false in the Bible 
would serve a good purpose if it were interpreted 
rightly, for it would require study to separate the 
true from the false, and in that way would make 
a more lasting impression. But in order to build 
up religion where it was wanted so as to be a 
power, people were told to swallow it all for fear 
if they ever began to question things they would 
use their brains and that power would be lost. 
By swallowing it all, people went to sleep. It 
was simply believed, or rather people tried to be- 
lieve, because the Bible said so. The only right 
thing to be believed, and the only thing which can 
be said to be the truth, must measure up to the 
standard of Christianity. That is the standard 
set by God. All others are wrong. The wrong 
ones are simply for testing how far we have ad- 
vanced in the knowledge of God's will, how far we 
understand what God wants us to do. If all the 
statements in the Bible were the truth, all you 
would have to do would be to say, " Yes," and 
you would be right. But when it says something 
that looks so near the truth that you can hardly 
tell the genuine from the spurious or false, then 
you are tested to show what you know. If, when 
a direct lie or falsehood is told, — one which is so 
plain that it shows its falseness at a glance, and 
which you who claim to be of sound mind and can 
reason know you would call a lie if you met the 
same condition in daily life, — if, when you see 
it in the Bible you believe it or try to believe 



42 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

it because the Bible says so, — where is your 
reasoning? Where is what you have learned? 
Or have you learned anything? Have you a 
brain? Has God given you a brain to use or are 
you failing at the critical point ? Or are you too 
lazy to use your brain? God did not want all 
plain truths in that Bible ; he wanted you to know 
the truth when you met it and also the false when 
you met it. He wanted you to know one from 
the other. To be a Christian you must be a 
graduate, not a freshman. To be a boss means 
more than to be an apprentice. The boss must 
know where everything belongs, the apprentice is 
taught. To be a Christian you must be able to 
separate lies from truth even if you find them 
mixed in the Bible. 

When potatoes were first introduced, people 
tried to use what grew above ground instead of 
in the ground. They did not know any better. 
In gathering nuts some people who are unac- 
quainted with them have tried to eat the bitter 
shell and found their mistake only when they got 
deeper in. Just so it is in everything. You 
either know or you don't. To be able to tell at 
any time, at any place, under any condition, the 
right from something else is the testing point of 
knowledge. You must be able to know you have 
found a diamond if you meet it in a hog lot or 
among a bunch of gems made to reprresent a 
diamond. The only reason God gave us a brain 
is that we should use it. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 43 

There are some who are less endowed than 
others, and that has a good reason. There is so 
much different work to do in this world that we 
need people of different makes, so to speak. 
Each one should fill a certain place and each one 
is just as important in that place as his neigh- 
bor elsewhere. But we do not do justice, and 
proportion things out unjustly. If, then, one 
is created to know more about God's plan, he 
should use it in accord with that understanding, to 
improve the world and not to impoverish it. So 
let us be careful to get a correct understanding of 
spiritual things. 

The clergy tell us that God is shaped like a 
human being, his humanity going so far as to have 
an individual son by way of the holy ghost. We 
consider it foolish for the heathens to have some 
image which they call their God, but it is just as 
foolish for us to consider the superhuman Power, 
the Creator of the universe, the God, as a man, as 
it is for the heathen to pray to a wooden man. 
Nobody living or who has ever lived has ever seen 
God. God is simply beyond human conception. 
We can see evidences of God in this world, but 
what God really is, nobody knows. In believing 
God a person we are only a step ahead of the 
heathen who believes his wooden man is God. We 
may know what is beyond a wall, but we can not 
see through that wall. We may have reasons for 
believing how it may be to-morrow, but we don't 
know. So it is with regard to God, — we can have 



44 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

a feeling of what God may be, but nobody knows 
anything definite about the being of God. 

Another folly is calling God three persons in 
one. How can three distinct persons be one? 
Three is not one, ever. And one cannot be 
three. You may say that this would be so in 
worldly affairs, in human affairs, but with re- 
gard to God it is different. I pray thee, to whom 
are you trying to explain that God is three per- 
sons.^ To humans, aren't you? Then use hu- 
man reasoning. You must make yourself under- 
stood if you want to explain anything. If you 
reason with children six years of age, you must 
use their method of reasoning to make yourself 
understood. You would not work an example in 
algebra with the pupils of the baby class. Nor 
would you talk Spanish to a Frenchman. God 
in three persons is referred to as the father, the 
son and the holy ghost. How can the father and 
the son be one person. The father must be be- 
fore the son is. The father is the father of the 
son. That is what makes one a father, — his 
priority. If, then, one has to live a certain 
length of time before he can reproduce himself, 
become a father, it follows that he is a being dis- 
tinct from the one he produced. The name son is 
given to his offspring. One is independent of the 
other so far as person is concerned. For this 
reason again father and son cannot be one per- 
son. In the case of twins, there might be some 
little excuse for making a mistake and calling 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 45 

them one, for they may look alike, but even twins 
are two persons. But when one is the father and 
the other the son, you would not think of calling 
them one person. 

Now, then, so far we have two persons which 
the clergy try to make one, and to cap the climax 
they bring in a ghost besides. If two persons 
might be made one, if such a thing were possible, 
they would at least be two of a kind, but you 
cannot mix ghosts and persons. You must have 
likes; therefore the holy ghost cannot be God, 
neither can the son. There is only one God and 
one God only. It would not do for three to be 
God. If it were three persons, we should not 
have a God. If there were three on the job, 
they would quarrel. Then, again, they claim the 
son was begotten by the holy ghost. According 
to that, God is not the father of what they caU 
the son of God. The father begets the child and 
if the holy ghost begot the son, he is the father 
of him. Note the remarkable discrepancy. 
That is a true human trait for you. If it took 
three to make one God, then God would not be 
omnipotent. He would be only as strong as the 
part he represents. 

Now I don't want anybody to think that there 
is no God. There is a God. But if you have 
had the wrong conception so far, you may come to 
the conclusion that there is no God. If you don't 
believe on God in the same light you used to, it 
shows you are getting a better view, and you 



46 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

should endeavor to find out more about God. 
And God will help you. If the heathen refuses- 
longer to believe on his wooden God, it does not 
mean that there is no God, but that God is not 
made of wood. We shall never know on this 
earth just what God is, but by application we can 
get a better understanding, enough to be able to 
do God's will. God being the only God, the high- 
est power we know of, he ordained that man 
should become like him. Therefore we were 
created so that we could develop to that degree. 
And that makes man the highest power on earth. 
This gives us reason to investigate deeper into the 
mysteries. 

Let us investigate the teachings about heaven 
and hell. We are taught to believe that the good 
ones will land in heaven after death. Heaven is 
supposed to be a nice place where we can live our 
next life just like in dreamland, — nothing to do, 
nothing to worry about, no aches and pains, no 
worry where the next meal comes from, etc. ; in 
fact everything as pleasing as one could wish for, 
all the good one can think of, — a regular loaf- 
ing place. 

The bad ones will land in hell. This place is 
just the opposite of heaven. Here everything 
that can worry human nature is found. All the 
bad things you can imagine are in vogue, and, be- 
sides, the Devil and his followers are there to make 
your life miserable. To make it still worse you 
are in a living fire. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 47 

One or the other of those places you get to 
after this life's journey, and there you remain 
forever in a conscious state. This they tell us is 
the outcome of our life's journey. Just think of 
it ! If you happen to fail to grasp the idea 
which would bring you to heaven and you get to 
hell, what fun it is for God to watch you burn 
through all eternity in hellfire. Suppose you 
were born of very poor parents and had to work 
from infancy until death, struggling* to get a bare 
living, never having time to read, study or re- 
flect, tired and underfed all your lifetime, and if 
anything cursing your existence, wishing all the 
time death would relieve you of your miserable 
estate, and all this through no fault of yours ; 
God or somebody placed you where you were and 
kept you there. Then after death you are 
burned through all eternity in hellfire. That is 
some consolation. That is Love, — God the 
father, as they call him, the God of Love, cre- 
ating people for the particular pleasure of seeing 
them burn in hell. 

Another place in the Bible tells us that God 
visits the " iniquities of the fathers upon the chil- 
dren unto the third and fourth generations." Is 
that a just God.? If your father commits a 
crime, you are punished, and not only you, but 
your children and their children thereafter. 
Think of this. It would be a blessing in such a 
case if God would kill the father before he com- 
mitted the crime and made the following genera- 



48 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

tions suffer for it. If God's wrath happened to 
subside in the third generation, the fourth one 
might have a chance for heaven, but if he were 
still angry, he would continue his wrath upon the 
fourth generation, and if he pleased, could still 
continue it. Note the inconsistency. 

The Bible and the clergy tell us we prepare 
our own place for the future, — either heaven or 
hell, — and then again they tell us we are born 
destined to perdition. The clergy say one of the 
means to get you to heaven is the church, — join 
the church if you want to enter heaven. The 
Bible forbids some people from entering the con- 
gregation of the Lord. Not only does the Bible 
exclude a man who happens to be crippled in per- 
son from entering the church ; it goes so far as to 
exclude generations and even whole nations from 
entering into the congregation of the Lord. The 
clergy say religion is concerned with a man's soul ; 
the body doesn't count ; that molders in the grave. 
Then, according to the Bible, if you happen to 
be injured in some part of your anatomy you can- 
not enter. That is soul saving for you. Mil- 
lions of people are barred. (Deuteronomy 23: 
1-4.) 

Again, somebody is born under conditions where 
the teaching about God, heaven and hell is not 
known. What about those people? Others, 
again, are born rich, join the church, go to 
church, pray and sing, but their position in life 
is such that through their riches they cannot lead 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 49 

a Christian life in accord with Christianity. 
Those also must stand condemned. And by the 
time you size everybody up, there won't be one 
entering heaven. 

As was stated previously, this earth is our 
school and everything we encounter is some lesson. 
Also we must advance from one class to another 
before we can become like God. Therefore we 
come to the conclusion that the idea the clergy 
are spreading is wrong. We are training our 
thoughts on this earth and we will advance into 
that class where our thoughts fit. Here on earth 
we have all kinds of thinking and we live mixed. 
But after death we will be separated and put in 
that class where we belong. In that way we will 
be measured by the same measure we have meas- 
ured with. 

Have your thoughts been trained to get the 
better of your neighbor? You will be in the class 
where your thoughts are all alike. Then you 
will take your own medicine and you surely can- 
not complain because on earth you dished out 
that kind. Have you made millions out of the 
sweat and blood of your fellow men.'' You will be 
put into the millionaire class, and there you can 
work out 3^our principles on your own class and 
see how they work. But those principles will not 
work, and you would starve to death, but you 
will be fed a few crumbs to keep you alive, just as 
you are doing now to others. Have you always 
conspired by tricks of business to raise the prices 



50 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

on everything? You will experience how that will 
work. Have you bought judges and lawyers? 
You will try having it applied to yourself. Has 
your ton been less than 2000 pounds? You will 
be shortweighted. Have you existed on lies and 
gossip? You will be in that class and then you 
will know for yourself how it feels. That, then, 
is heaven or hell, — the state of the mind. When 
you realize what you have lost, when you are mis- 
erable, — yes, when you might be said to be burn- 
ing, — you will be most unhappy, but you will be 
measured by your own measure. And it could 
have been so different ! 

You will stay in that condition long enough to 
learn your lesson never to want to do it again. 
You will not be pardoned and removed so that 
you can get back to the old ways the first chance 
you get. No, you will stay there till it leaves 
your system never to return. And that takes a 
long while. That surely is hell enough. 

On the other hand, if your mind has been 
trained not to take advantage of your neighbor 
in any way, shape, or form, you will enter that 
class, and there will be joy and plenty. That is 
heaven. Here on earth we live all mixed together. 
That is what makes your existence possible, — the 
variety of things ; but when you are in your own 
class, and it must be produced by your method, 
you simply cannot exist. You will have to be 
given a few crumbs such as the poor get now. 
The moral is that if you want to be in heaven 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 51 

you must always give fuU value on earth in such 
a way that you would be willing to take what you 
are trying to hand to the other fellow. To re- 
peat, heaven or hell is the state of the mind after 
death and not a place, as the clergy try to 
tell us. And I want to say here that there will 
be lots of ministers of the gospel in hell. 

Another folly the ministers try to scare people 
with is the invention of a devil. There is no such 
thing as another being, made especially to be the 
devil. The only devil ever made is man. If you 
want to call that class of men and women who 
have sinister motives devils, I am with you. They 
are the only devils I recognize. The clergy say 
the devil does mislead people. You must fight the 
devil. If somebody does som.ething good, then 
God gave him power. If somebody does something 
bad, he was overruled by the devil. Such non- 
sense ! According to that, God is a weakling and 
cannot overcome the devil. That's why God 
needs an army of millions of ministers to fight the 
devil, and that one fellow is leading him a merry 
chase, — just like Villa and the United States 
army of thousands of soldiers ; and Villa is still 
making faces at them ! WTio led you astray ? 
Who told you to do this bad thing or that ? Who 
made you tell lies ? Who told you to do anything 
that was wrong? The devil? The snake? Be 
reasonable, be honest, stop and think. Tell the 
truth, stand your ground and don't try to in- 
vent something behind which to hide and on which 



52 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

to lay the blame. Your answer must be that it 
is yourself and yourself only. 

If the clergy are correct in their statement 
about the devil, it seems that God must be in ca- 
hoots with the devil, for broad is the way and 
there are many travelling on it, and wide is the 
gate and easy to enter, and the path is full of 
roses and frolic all the way. The white lights 
of Broadway are lit and a merry crowd you see. 
Living is high, but not in the sense that it is with 
poor folks, i.e., costing so much that they can 
hardly afford to buy food and fuel, — eggs 50 
cents a dozen, potatoes $^.00 a bushel, flour $6.00 
a hundred, hard coal $13.00 a ton of 1700 pounds, 
and everything going up. Print paper up to 
$8.00 a hundred pounds. Some schools have or- 
dered examinations to be written on both sides of 
the sheet because paper can hardly be bought. 
The movies are charging two potatoes as the 
price of admission. No, not in that way is living 
high. They are living high on that Broadway; 
life is easy, — plenty to eat, plenty to drink, no 
thought about anything. Then the Lord leads 
some poor, starving creature to that wide gate 
and lets him have a peep, and the poor soul faints. 
Some of the gay party give him a little cham- 
pagne and he comes to. Is it any wonder he will 
travel that road.^ He has passed the other gate 
before and thought it belonged to some family liv- 
ing within the enclosure. He tried to get in, but 
it was so dark and the road so rough he was glad 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 53 

to get back out again. That is the picture the 
clergy spreads. 

No, I will tell you what the broad and the nar- 
row way means. Cast away your invented devil 
and shoulder your own blame. You are con- 
fronted by something and the spark of godliness 
rings and tells you what to do. But you feel it is 
easier for you not to obey it, or you think you 
gain by not obeying that ring. You are warned, 
but you follow the thoughts of your mind and not 
the voice of your bosom. It is you who are de- 
ciding, and no devil or snake is whispering in your 
ear. You yourself are the determining factor. 
If you yield to the voice of your bosom, you are 
complying with God's wish. If you follow your 
mind, you are that much weaker to resist tempta- 
tion the next time. This can be repeated often 
enough until either the voice of your bosom or 
your mind is the determining factor in your de- 
cisions. Obedience to the spark of godliness will 
prepare you for heaven, meaning that state of the 
mind where you will feel comfortable in the future 
life. Obedience to the human mind will put you 
in hell, meaning that state of your mind where 
you will always be in misery. And you have only 
yourself to blame, — neither devil or snake. 
You cannot advance any plea that will save you. 
Your church won't save you, your minister won't 
save you and your teachings won't save you. 
You cannot say, " I was taught thus and it would 
not have done for me to advance new ideas or they 



54? THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

would have ejected me from the church." No 
excuse whatever which you may offer will help 
you. If God gave you warning, that is what de- 
termines your fate. Of course it is convenient to 
put the blame on the devil but mistake not, it will 
not help you; you are your own devil. 

And one person can be the devil for another 
person. Man is the devil that is working against 
God and God's plans, and no other devil, either 
real or imaginary. The Bible proves it. The 
Bible, and millions of other books besides, had to 
be written in an effort to make man good. Also 
millions of good men, who lived the best life they 
could, in accordance with God's will, have spent 
their time, energy, and life even^ trying to keep 
man from going to hell, as it were, and away from 
God. 

But in spite of all this big effort, man is grow- 
ing worse instead of better. We have the same 
situation in our daity life. Right along laws 
must be made to curb the bad doings of man; 
otherwise we could not bear life. It takes as 
many books and as many men to guard against 
the evil proclivities of man in the pastoral life as 
in the spiritual life. Now I am not saying that 
all of our earthly laws are in accordance to God's 
will. Far from it. Some of them are corrupt, 
and some lawmakers are so corrupt that it is no 
wonder. But that is just another proof of the 
corruption of man. Even the most corrupt man 
realizes that the spark of goodness which God 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 55 

plants in every human being must not be killed 
entirely. Kill it entirely and man becomes more 
degraded than any beast. Realizing that, the 
lawmakers must not pass too corrupt laws so the 
masses won't balk in harness, so to speak. If 
anything happens, the devil is blamed, which is 
only man's corrupt way of putting the blame on 
something else. Instead of standing up squarely 
and taking his just deserts, it is put upon some 
imaginary being. Man usually always tries to 
put the blame on somebody else, only not on the 
right one. And as a last resort, when he can't 
find anything living or dead on which to saddle the 
blame, he goes so far as to invent something, — 
anything except himself. If everybody would be 
honest enough to stand up and take his blame, the 
devil would die a natural death; furthermore 
there never would have been any necessity for in- 
venting the devil. 

There are two, and two only, forces around 
which centers the universe. The first is God 
and the second man. God, being the creator, 
is the highest, and man, being created so as to be- 
come like God, is the next highest. Before man 
can become like God he must pass through differ- 
ent stages, and this earthly life is one. Just as 
the seconds make minutes and the minutes hours, 
or as the year has seasons, or as there are classes 
in schools and one school is the preparer for an- 
other, so must man pass from his life on this earth 
to another life on another planet until he gradu- 



56 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

ates, so to speak. If he falls by the wayside, he 
doesn't reach his destination. Or, in other words, 
if that spark of godliness is killed in man, it can- 
not grow and develop and he fails to learn his les- 
sons ; therefore he cannot become like God. That 
is the torture, that is hell, when he realizes his 
mistake. But this hell is not kept by a devil. 
All the devilish conditions are caused by man, and 
that makes man the devil. Study over any evil 
you know of and use your brain and don't let any- 
body say " devil," and you will find a man or a 
woman the devil that did it. If the law of Chris- 
tianity was applied, this devil would go up in 
vapor. " Do unto others as you would have 
others do unto you," and the devil is dead. The 
selfishness in man is the devil. Show me a cir- 
cumstance which in common is blamed to the devil 
and I will show you that that man or woman did 
it and not the devil. Devil is just a name for 
bad people just as angel is a name for good peo- 
ple. Angels, as the clergy try to make them, do 
not exist. We as a people can be held account- 
able only for what we know, and God asks no 
more. And so long as he has not shown us any 
devils or angels, there aren't any. 

Someone will say, " I believe that anything I 
have not seen does not exist." Not so. When I 
say God has not shown us any angels or devils 
such as the clergy tell us about, I mean that no- 
body has ever seen them. Regarding anything 
we need to know about God gives us enough facts 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 57 

without a cleft between, and surely such things, 
which mean life and death to us, we should know 
about. To say there is a devil is just a way of 
leading people on a wrong trail, a wrong scent, 
like trying to make a horse go by dangling a 
bucket of oats in front of him. Hitch him up and 
hang the oats in front of him and he will try to 
get the oats, but no matter how fast he goes, the 
oats are just so far ahead of him all the time. 
He will never catch up. By having a phantom 
devil somewhere, in some unknown place, the whip 
is always held over the superstitious and unthink- 
ing. As long as you can keep them scared by 
saying " devil," you can handle them about as 
you please. That is the reason the devil was in- 
vented, — like scaring children by saying " wolf." 
The early clergy were cunning enough to get up 
that joke, and it worked well. But it is the same 
with this devil story as with every other untruth, 
— they do not last forever. No matter what is 
gotten up to deceive, in time it will be exposed and 
lose its power. 

When it comes to getting your living on this 
earth, then actual, hard facts stare you in the 
face, — real, concrete facts, which can be meas- 
ured in every way. And one of those facts is 
that you must have the DOLLAR. And after 
you have that DOLLAR and you want to get the 
value for it, then it becomes a dollar. They 
will raise the prices on everything so that dollar 
will look as big as a penny and be just about as 



58 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

strong as a penny. Yes, then everything is a 
reality and you cannot get away from it. If you 
were to hold your dollar against the sun and try 
to pay with its shadow they would cart you off to 
an insane asylum or the penitentiary, for you 
must deliver the actual goods even if you don't get 
full value through conspiracy in raising prices 
just because they feel like it. Yes, everything is 
real; you would be called crazy if you expected 
anything else, anything abstract. But when it 
comes to the devil, you must believe on the ab- 
stract. Oh, what a joke! The devil is the same 
personality as Santa Claus, the stork, and in line 
with the Easter rabbit. It is just a playing upon 
the feeling people have about the mysterious. 
For the best results the Truth is the only thing to 
use, but people want to profit by the ignorance of 
others and that's why this devil story was spread. 
The term devil can be used only as a general 
name to designate the bad doings of people when 
it is not necessary to give a specific name to the 
deed. Suppose somebody insists upon doing or 
saying things that are bad, detrimental to the 
welfare of the world, not in accordance with 
Christianity. Then you might say he is sold to 
the devil, or that he is serving the devil, — simply 
meaning the evil thought of man and not a per- 
son in the form of present day teaching. 

The same applies to the term hell. Hell is 
not a place, but a state of mind. If some trust 
magnate is going to hell, or if he is said to be 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 59 

burning in the lowest hell, or if it is said that 
some of these war advocates should be in a still 
worse hell than there is supposed to exist be- 
cause that hell is too good for them, it can only 
mean that their peace of mind or state of mind 
shall be such-and-such degree of misery. And it 
will be. I don't mean it will be so because some- 
body says so or wishes them so. Far from it, 
the wisher may be in the condition he wishes the 
other fellow in. But we will be given just as we 
deserve. Leave that to God. Some have created 
hell on this earth for others and they will be 
measured by their own rules. " As ye sow, so 
shall ye reap." 

Someone will say, " It would not do to tell 
people the truth; if you take the devil away, you 
cannot govern them any more." Let me tell you 
that the truth cannot hurt us. On the other 
hand, it will do more good to spread the truth 
than to conceal it. If we finally become like God 
and in the end find that there never was a devil, 
how does that square up? So we might as well 
know the truth. There are many people who 
know these things, but they are still well behaved. 
They even behave better for knowing; they are 
good for the sake of good. Of course the wiser 
a person is the more he can become a power for 
evil if he wants to, but if he is wise, he will not 
turn bad but rather grow better right along, for 
a reaction is bound to come and well may he 
fear it. 



CHAPTER V 

Another subject of vital importance to us is 
the teachings about the personality of Christ. 
We are told that Christ is God. Again we are 
told Christ was a man. Now he can be only one 
kind. If he is God, he cannot be a man ; that is 
impossible. And if he was a man, he cannot be 
God; another impossibility. Man can become 
like God but that takes more than a life on this 
earth. I want to say before I go any further 
that Christ was a man, bom of a human female 
and sired by a human male. This is the only 
way woman ever gave birth to a child. That is 
God's immutable law. No woman can bear a 
child unless she has conceived from a man. That 
is one law God made and you can not change it if 
you write a million more Bibles trying to prove it. 
If Mary gave birth to Christ, then Joseph was 
his father, as he was the husband of Mary. 
Probably Joseph never knew that the record of 
the birth of Christ was put in the Bible; other- 
wise he would have put in his protest. 

Some who don't believe the record in the Bible 
about the birth of Christ claim that Joseph was 
not the father of Christ, saying Mary had con- 
ceived from another man before her marriage to 

Joseph. That deduction is logical, as they can- 

60 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 61 

not believe that Christ was begotten by the holy 
ghost and the record says that when Joseph 
found Mary in that condition he was grieved and 
wanted to disown Mary. If the Bible record to 
this effect was true, that would be the only de- 
duction to make. But so long as there are so 
many untruths in the Bible, let us call this an 
untruth and give Mary the benefit of the doubt, 
and say the record is not the truth. This would 
make Joseph the father of Christ. 

On account of the special personality of Christ, 
the people of that time, being very superstitious, 
came to the conclusion that Christ was more than 
human. It is only logical and they meant well, 
not once thinking that they were putting Mary 
in a bad light as it was quite the custom in those 
days to blame some ghost for the condition some 
girls were in, and it had gained such foothold 
that the good people of that time, wanting to 
honor Christ, believed he was sired by what they 
called the holy ghost. If Luther, Edison, Mar- 
coni and others had lived at the time Christ did, 
the people would have deified them also. And the 
story of Jonah and the whale might have turned 
out to be a submarine built to resemble a fish, for 
it would have been only logical for people of those 
times to imitate existing signs, and fish were swim- 
mers. Just so, in our time, when we first built 
ships we made them of wood, thinking wood was 
the only material that could float on water. Any- 
body at that time advocating armor plate for 



62 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

shipbuilding would have been put in the insane 
asylum. Take all of our inventions; they were 
viewed in the same light. Of course just now peo- 
ple are getting so very wise and a remarkable in- 
vention is hardly announced before it is out of 
date. Thus we are changing. But this very day 
there are people in these United States who will 
see things and believe things that are an exact 
counterpart of the spirit existing in Christ's 
time. 

To sum up, Christ was a man, sired by Joseph 
and borne by Mary. A person, no matter who 
he is, and this applies to Christ, must be wholly 
human. You cannot have a person half human 
and half ghost or half anything else. This is 
an utter impossibility. 

Then again, the record says he was begotten 
by the holy ghost. This would make, according 
to the Bible, only two persons so far, namely God 
and the holy ghost, for Christ was not yet in ex- 
istence. The holy ghost was just becoming the 
means to the existence and birth of Christ through 
Mary. That circumstance creates Christ later 
than the holy ghost and God. Again, if the holy 
ghost came to where Mary lived, he must be a 
small being about the size of man and that would 
again leave God somewhere a separate being from 
the ghost. Thus we have three distinct and 
separate beings said to be God, three persons in 
one and not bom triplets. No, the record is not 
true. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 63 

Again, if Christ is God he must have been 
before Mary was. And God has no mother. 
'God is said to be infinite. How can the finite 
give birth to the infinite? The infinite is sup- 
posed to be without beginning and without end. 
This must prevent the infinite God, called Christ, 
from entering the womb of Mary and being born 
a human being, for in that case he would have an 
end as a God and a beginning as a man. The 
human womb cannot contain a God. Impossible ! 

Again, if Christ is a distinct person and was a 
distinct person from before the world was, how 
can he enter the womb of Mary.? And how can 
the holy ghost sire Christ if Christ was a separate 
entity and a God at that; he would not have 
needed the holy ghost, for he would have been om- 
nipotent as a God. Further, the human womb 
can use only human material. Half gods are no 
gods. And a half human does not exist. First 
they say Christ is God, then that he is half god. 
After making the Bible record that Christ was 
begotten by the holy ghost, they proclaim him 
the son of God instead of the son of the holy 
ghost. 

Then again they give two genealogies for 
Christ, and in those his ancestors are given, all 
human men, from Joseph to David. The untruth 
in this again is that in one genealogy he has fore- 
fathers which he has not in the other. A pedi- 
gree of this kind would not be accepted today by 
anyone. They claim he was sired by the holy 



64f THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

ghost (being a God already), which makes him 
the son of God, and then they try to trace him 
back to David, giving ancestors in one pedigree 
which are not contained in the other. If he is 
God, you cannot trace his genealogy. And as 
long as he was sired by the holy ghost, what is 
the use of tracing his genealogy back to David .f^ 
To prove Christ's godliness they have the rec- 
ord of his resurrection. Now, then, if Christ 
died on a certain day and arose on a certain day, 
it must always be that day by number. Suppos- 
ing Christ died on Friday, April 5th. His anni- 
versary would always be the 5th of April. But 
if that date falls on Saturday, Sunday, etc., it 
might happen that it was shifted so as to cele- 
brate it on a Friday every year. For that occa- 
sion, supposing it was the fourteenth week of the 
new year, the first week in Aprir(that fourteenth 
week) might then be used every year. But now 
his death and resurrection is celebrated sometimes 
in March and sometimes in May. That is too 
much of a diiFerence and is a sign of the weakness 
of the record. Why do they celebrate his birth- 
day anniversary every year on the £5th of Decem- 
ber regardless of what day in the week it is.'* 
Because of that date they are sure. But of the 
date of his death and resurrection they are not. 
It is taught that Christ was crucified Friday and 
arose Sunday, making two nights and one day in 
the grave. That is the teaching and belief. But 
Matthew 12: 4?0 says: " For as Jonas was three 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 65 

days and three nights in the whale's belly; so 
shall the Son of man be three days and three 
nights in the heart of the earth." This shows 
they are fishing in the dark. They are guessing. 
Once he is called God, once Godman, once son 
of man, and so forth. Just for a moment we will 
consider their claim that Christ was half God 
and half man, this creature they hold up to us as 
a model man, one we should pattern after. Is 
not that the worst nonsense out.^^ What kind of 
a God have they to give us humans, we who are 
made entirely of the flesh? A model to live by 
which is half God. Why, that is ridiculous. It 
is easy to see how such a person (if he could ex- 
ist) would be able to do much better than an all 
flesh person, and to give us a standard like that 
to pattern after would be the silliest of silly 
things to do. Give us something of our own kind. 
Don't get conceited because you can see better 
than a blind man or outwalk a man with wooden 
legs. Either one of them would be just as fair. 
Mighty little can you boast of beating a man 
with wooden legs. For us all-humans to take a 
half human (and his other half God) for an ex- 
ample would be just like trying to heat the house 
with ice instead of coal. There is as much diff^er- 
ence as there is between night and day. As well 
might two men start out on a night so dark they 
can't see their hands before their eyes on a thirty- 
mile automobile trip across the country, one man 
without any light whatsoever and the other with 



66 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

the best of electric lights on his machine. It is 
easy to see who would get there first. The first 
fellow would be found with a broken neck. 

Again, if Christ was half God and half man, it 
would constitute admission by God that no human 
being can live such a life as God wants us to live 
it because he had to give us a Godman for an ex- 
ample. This would constitute a fraud, pure and 
simple, just as if a manufacturer should make a 
mighty fine sample by which to sell his goods and 
then, after getting the order, make something 
just one half as good. Therefore I say he should 
have given us for a model a whole human. And 
God did ; mistake not. If Christ had been God, 
he would not have had to study until he was thirty 
years of age before he could preach. 

Here is another irregularity regarding his res- 
urrection. He is quoted as saying to the fellow 
on the cross, " Verily, verily, I say to you, to-day 
thou shalt be with me in paradise," This, it is 
stated, he said on Friday. On different occasions 
it is stated he should lie in the grave till the third 
day, then arise and go to heaven. How can you 
reconcile this? He says on Friday, the day of 
his death, he will go to heaven on that same day, / 

yet the claim is made that he laid in the grave 
till Sunday, when he arose and ascended. Some- 
body might say it has reference to his soul and 
not to his body. But isn't it stated in the Bible 
that the body of Christ in heaven presents the 
scars of his crucifixion.'^ So it must be the same 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 67 

body. And when they tried to touch him after 
his supposed resurrection, did he not tell them not 
to touch him as he had not yet ascended to 
heaven? This implies that he was supposed to 
have ascended. The day of his death he is quoted 
as telling the man on the cross he would this day 
be with him in heaven, yet the next week after he 
says he has not yet ascended. Can one believe 
anything so faulty as that? After they try to 
bring different kinds of proof that he ascended 
on the third day, they try to make it appear that 
he ascended forty days later. His ascension is 
celebrated to-day forty days after he was sup- 
posed to have ascended. 

In several places in the Bible can be found 
quotations to the effect that there is only one 
God; also there is "no savior besides me." If 
Christ was God, he should be still with us, for 
isn't it a great injustice on the part of the loving 
God to give us Christ a few years and keep the 
devil among us all the time? 



CHAPTER VI 

We are told that God made Adam out of wet 
earth somewhat as the artist does at the fair, or 
as cliildren make mud-pies. Just reflect a few 
moments and let your thoughts dwell on the pic- 
ture of Lord God Almighty on some river bank, 
wetting some earth, rolling it like dough, and 
when of the right consistency shaping Adam and 
then letting him dry in the sun. Then when it is 
dry he blows into his nose and that bunch of dirt 
becomes flesh and blood and bones and eyes and 
lungs and arteries and nerves and everything that 
goes to make a man. It can walk and talk and 
hear. And it understood the language right 
away. About in this wise was Adam created. 

Who can believe that God made Adam thus? 
Still the story is logical if we call to mind the 
impression the people who wrote it had of God. 
They imagined God to be a man and of a man's 
capabilities, and their knowledge of what consti- 
tutes a man, what goes to make up an organism, 
was nil. This is proven by their making for 
themselves gods out of almost any material, just 
so it resembled a human shape. They did not 
think anything about the internal workings of a 

body. That was something they knew absolutely 

68 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 69 

nothing about. They had no idea that their own 
anatomy was governed by internal mechanism. 
They simply saw the outside and knew there was 
air passing into them. They had no idea that 
the inside is what makes the outside possible. If 
they had known that it took the vital parts to 
make a man, they would never have made images. 
But they were as far down the level of knowledge 
as is a baby who fondles her doll and coos to it in 
a motherly fashion, calling it her baby. Some- 
thing, some instinct, is in her, and she may be- 
come as strongly attached to her dolly as a 
mother is to her child. 

The instinct of a higher being was implanted 
in those people, and when they ran out of human 
images, they worshipped something else; it made 
no difference what it was. Anybody who tried to 
spread news like that nowadays would become the 
subject of an insanity commission. But because 
it sa3''s so in the Bible, people will not use their 
brains to discern, but just say " Yes." If they 
read in the Bible these words, " You are the big- 
gest fool out," there would be plenty of them 
who would say, " Yes, I am, because the Bible 
tells me so." Christ himself has said : " Search 
the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have 
eternal life." He did not sa}^ " ye have." But 
the Scriptures were above all books the book 
which contained the most writings about God, 
heaven, hell, devil, etc. Books were not so plenti- 
ful then as they are now, and " the Scriptures " 



70 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

refers to the Bible because of certain subjects it 
contains. But never was such an interpretation 
to be put upon it as the clergy have given it. 

Nobody can live according to the Bible. It is 
full of lies, deception, slavery, prostitution, adul- 
tery, robbery, theft, blasphemy, murder, war, 
cruelty to animals and children, cannibalism, 
witchcraft and contradictions. Can any sane 
person believe all it contains? If we were to do 
to-day the things the Bible sanctions, we should 
hang to the nearest tree or be shot full of holes 
or tarred and feathered. Some of the biggest 
men the Bible holds up for us as examples have 
been of the lowest kind. No ; surely it is up to 
us to weed out truth from untruth. Then this 
imbecility of trying to make us believe that be- 
cause this man Adam, this fellow which God made 
out of a bunch of clay, sinned (whatever that is), 
we are condemned to an everlasting death of hell- 
fire and brimstone, — ye gods ; what kind of a God 
is this? He himself makes himself a man out of 
a bunch of dirt and then, when this dirt man 
doesn't come out right, condemns and damns mil- 
lions and billions of innocent people to everlast- 
ing agony. Why didn't God consign himself to 
hell-fire, for it was his fault that dirt man went 
wrong and nobody's in the twentieth century. 
A God making himself a dirt man and cursing all 
eternity because he spoiled the job! Can any- 
thing so foolish be imagined? If somebody in the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 71 

United States commits murder, you can, by the 
same reasoning, kill everybody else. 

Put the blame where it belongs. The only rea- 
sonable interpretation of this incident is that 
every individual is called by that name Adam fig- 
uratively. Every man or woman is created in 
accordance with God's plan. Every one has that 
spark of godliness in his bosom. That spark of 
godliness is set there to oversee or guide our every 
doing. By obeying that spark we will do just 
what God wants us to do. We are put on our 
free will. We know that to obey our inborn de- 
sires means loss of favor by God, but we can see 
some seeming earthly advantage in doing so. 
And now the word, " Adam ! ! ! " rings on our ear 
and what will we decide to do? This happens 
time and time again and if we refuse to follow the 
voice of God and follow the voice of our own 
mind, then we stray away from the better future. 
And that is our hell and punishment, and thus 
everybody works out his or her own future des- 
tiny, much as it oftentimes works out here on 
earth. No matter who you are, or what relative 
position or standing you have, if you continually 
disobey or disregard the duty which your relation 
to each other requires, you must eventually suffer. 
If a hired man repeatedly refuses to do his work 
as he knows it should be done, he will in time lose 
his job. If a child disobeys continually, he will 
be suffering in that he will not be loved so well. 



7a THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

nor receive so many presents, and so forth. If a 
father continually disobeys his ring as to his duty 
to his child, he will lose the respect of his child 
and that child will do only what it absolutely 
must through fear until finally some day the child 
severs the connection and leaves. If husband or 
wife disobey the ring of godliness towards each 
other, they will be the loser. If, in a business re- 
lation, you abuse the lines of propriety, you lose; 
and so on down the line in everything. While 
you are apparently not losing every time or even 
seem to gain, you are nevertheless losing, for this 
is a law as immutable as the law which burns your 
hand if you put it in the fire. Billy Sunday 
thinks he has gained because he has accumulated 
lots of money by his preaching methods ; as for 
myself, I shiver when I think of what he has lost. 

The voice, " Adam," sounds on every man's 
ear if he will but listen. Don't try to chloroform 
yourself. While you can keep a person under the 
influence of the anaesthetic for some time, you can- 
not keep it up indefinitely. You must come out 
of it, and then the pain will be felt just as deeply 
and as distinctly as it is inflicted. In just the 
degree to which you have trespassed in this life 
will you suff^er in the next conscious life. You 
will not suff'er for the sins of the Adam of the 
clay, but for the sins or disobedience of the Adam 
which is yourself. 

That picture suits me better. I am willing to 
take my medicine. I am satisfied with what I 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 73 

get when I get what I have " coming to me." I 
don't want any more. Neither do I want the 
other fellow to shoulder my load. And I surely 
don't want the other fellow's dues. I don't want 
the dirt Adam's transgressions heaped upon me. 
I have all I can do to carry my own load. And 
you think any just God would make you suffer 
for the wrong some other fellow has done.^^ If 
your God does it, you are welcome to your God. 
I don't want anything of such a God, who pun- 
ishes one fellow for the disobedience of another. 
It is blasphemy to a just God to say he will pun- 
ish one for the wrongdoings of another. The 
next time somebody is to hang by the verdict of 
the court, please step up yourself and be hung and 
turn the culprit lose. This seems to be the rea- 
soning of such a creed. 

Now comes the beautiful creation of woman. 
In the first place I should like to know how the 
dirt Adam knew he had to have a woman. That 
piece of walking clay had never seen a woman. 
He never knew there was such a creature. What 
was he wanting a woman for? Not knowing that 
there were any other human beings, how could he 
desire one.'' We must always know of a thing 
first before we can get a desire for it. And sup- 
pose Adam was lonesome and wanted a compan- 
ion. God could have made him another man just 
like himself and then there would have been two 
men. If that had not been enough, God would 
have made more or could have taught the business 



74 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

to Adam and Company and they could have made 
as many as they Hked. They had no need for a 
woman. There was nothing to cook, no house to 
clean, no buttons to sew on, no shirts to iron, no 
babies to take care of, no cows to milk, or any- 
thing of that sort. What did he want a woman 
for.'^ How did he know there could be such a 
creature as a woman .^^ Well, at any rate, he got 
his woman. 

And this we are told is the starting point of 
the population of the earth! Now every breeder 
knows that you should not inbreed. And God in 
his ignorance took a rib out of Adam and made 
out of it the woman who was to conceive children 
from Adam. If God has established the law of 
breeding, why should he be the first one to violate 
it.f^ The only reason we foolish and ignorant peo- 
ple inbreed is that we don't know any better or 
that we have not the money to buy new blood. 
We have passed laws regulating the marriage of 
relatives, realizing the dangers of intermarriage. 
Brother and sister are not allowed to marry. If 
by chance they do get married, they are not al- 
lowed to continue in the married relation. It has 
happened that brother and sister have married, 
and when it was found out they have had to sepa- 
rate. Marriage between parent and child is also 
prohibited, — all because we poor humans are so 
wise that we know it is harmful. But they try 
to tell us that God took a part of Adam and made 
him a woman out of it! How much wiser would 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 75 

it have been for God to go to another continent 
and make him a woman out of earth from a 
strange land. This would comply with the law of 
breeding. 

Another phase of the situation would be that 
Adam had gone through changes which made his 
clay bone, and that Eve, being created out of 
bone, was made out of different material than 
Adam; consequently there could be no breeding, 
for you cannot breed the unlike. You cannot 
breed plant and animal together. Therefore Eve 
should have been made of clay and gone through 
the same changes that Adam went through. 

No; surely Eve was never created that way. 
It is a disgrace and an insult to noble womanhood. 
The Bible version of the creation of woman is just 
one manifestation of man's corruptness and lord- 
ism. He would have created woman out of noth- 
ing, but in order to show her dependence upon 
man he condescended to concoct the story of how 
a very small piece of his anatomy was sufficient 
for her creation. The Bible is full of quotations 
of just such nature, degrading woman and mak- 
ing her a low piece of merchandise. If the Bible 
is correct with regard to the position woman 
should fill, why, then, have we laws on our statute 
boots that are just the opposite? If a man were 
to treat women as they should be treated accord- 
ing to the Bible, he would not escape very often. 
If the Bible is right, then our laws are wrong. 
But I am glad we have those laws and I am in favor 



76 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

of still better ones. Then not only the white-slavers 
themselves would catch it, but the fellows higher 
up as well. And any judge who is blinded by 
some rich fellow's gold would share the same fate. 
The fact that we have the laws on our statute 
books, laws which are directly opposed to the laws 
of the Bible, gives the Bible laws the lie, for we 
live by the statute in regard to woman and not by 
the Bible. Can anything be plainer? Or are we 
so foolish as not to understand the Bible? You 
churchwomen can thank your lucky stars that 
the laws are your protection and not the Bible, 
the code under which you live. 

Especially has religion worked hardships on 
widows, virgins and sterile females. In Exodus 
21 : 4 the Bible separates families, and in another 
place it says that they shall part only by death. 
Nowadays the clergy try to make us believe we 
must be married by some minister if we want to 
be united according to God's rules, and the Bible 
tells us where they used to steal women. The 
Bible upholds polygamy. (Deut. 21: 15-16.) 

Now, again, what kind of man was this Adam? 
Was he Jew or heathen? Was he Caucasian, Ne- 
gro, Indian, Chinaman, or what? We have five 
distinct races existing to-day, and each one breeds 
its own kind. A negro will never become a white 
person. So there is only one deduction to make 
and that is that each separate race was created 
separate by the Creator. Another circumstance 
in favor of this conclusion is that each different 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 77 

race might be said to have inhabited a different 
continent. They were separated by large bodies 
of water, and seafaring across the ocean was not 
in vogue, so they had no chance of passing from 
one continent to another. And since each race 
breeds only its own kind, it follows that they were 
created as distinct breeds. A negro will never 
breed a white man, no matter where he may live 
for century after century. The same is true of 
an Indian or a Chinaman. It is true enough that 
climatic conditions in time will cause changes, but 
those changes are never so great as to create a 
distinct race, or rather one entirely different from 
the original. Like begets like is as truly a law 
to-day as when the Creator established it. And 
to stamp its characteristics on its offspring is 
the only way of preserving the race. 

The people who got up the story of the crea- 
tion of Adam did so according to the understand- 
ing they had of things, and they are not much to 
blame when you consider where they stood in the 
march of development. But for us nowadays to 
believe, in the light of knowledge we possess, that 
Adam was created that way, is ridiculous. 

To give you another point to ponder over in 
this connection I will call to your mind the cen- 
taurs. The centaurs were believed to be a people 
half horse and half man. At the time the cen- 
taurs lived (?) you could have found any number 
of people who would say on oath that they had 
seen them with their own eyes. They were just 



78 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

as positive that they had seen centaurs as you 
are that you are alive. Now when such creatures 
as the centaurs can make an impression like that 
on the minds of the people, is it to be wondered 
at that the people of that time were led to believe 
Adam was created according to the description in 
the Bible? From their earliest conception they 
made men that way themselves, and they weren't 
far advanced, so they came to the conclusion that 
God made Adam; that's why he was better than 
their men. 

Touching again on the creation of Eve, we 
know that each parent contributes one half to 
the child's body; therefore Eve was not created 
out of a piece of rib from Adam, for Eve must be 
just like Adam in order to contribute her half. 
If Eve had been made out of a piece of rib from 
Adam, she would have been just that much of 
Adam only, and would not have been Eve at all. 
In order to become able to be a mother she must 
be on a par with Adam. You don't think for a 
moment that an almighty God, having all the uni- 
verse for material, was so hard up for material 
that he had to perform an operation on Adam 
and take out a rib to make a woman. I want to 
say that by all we humans know we must come 
to the conclusion that each entity was created in 
the original as an entity and not as a part taken 
from an entity and made into another entity. It 
would not be an entity if made from a fraction 
of another entity. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 79 

I want also to touch briefly on the widespread 
saying about man having descended from monkey. 
I make the statement that man has not descended 
from monkey. Everything was created in the 
original, and man is no exception. Lower down 
on the scale of development it is often difficult to 
discern one class from another, even when one 
organism is animal and one vegetable. We have 
meat-eating plants, also sensitive plants that will, 
on being touched, shrink, just as when you touch 
a human being. Then we have stationary ani- 
mals ; that is, animals which are grown fast in 
the ground like trees. Then, again, we have dis- 
tinct plants or animals so near alike that they 
can with difficulty be told apart. And all you 
can say as to man and monkey is that they are 
nearly alike. Some men are even bigger monkeys 
than the monkeys themselves, but their ancestors 
were not monkeys. 

Another point to show that the story of the 
creation of Adam as told in the Bible is false is 
that Cain went a short distance away from home 
and got himself a woman. That proves conclu- 
sively that there were other people living. And 
it was not far from Adam's shack either, for in 
those days five miles was farther than it is now 
across the pond. And Cain was afraid the people 
might want to kill him because he killed Abel. 
Pray, who was left to kill him if, as according to 
the Bible was the case, Adam was the first man 
created .f^ 



80 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

We will consider the story of the flood. By 
not making Adam right, people went from bad to 
worse and that made God angry and he wanted to 
drown them out. So the Bible tells us he flooded 
the earth and drowned everything alive in it. 
When the water subsided, Noah landed his ark on 
Mount Ararat. Had those people known any- 
thing beyond their own locality, this story would 
probably never have been written. According to 
this story Mount Ararat is the highest point on 
earth because it was the first dry spot to protrude 
through the water. Well, to-day we know that 
there are higher points than that, so that Noah 
would have been under water. They probably 
had a local flood. 

Another point in this connection is that Noah 
was to gather a pair of each kind of animals into 
the ark. How do you suppose he got the animals 
from the North Pole region or the South Pole or 
from Africa, Australia, Japan, China, the Equa- 
tor region. North and South America .^^ He would 
have been gray haired, — nay, he would not have 
lived long enough to gather the European bunch ; 
how he could have gotten them from the North 
Pole or from any place across the waters is more 
than I can understand. It simply " could not be 
did." It cannot be done even to-day. And how 
did he find all those little bugs, fleas, lice, disease- 
producing animals and so forth .'^ He must have 
also had swimming pools in that Ark for croco- 
diles, frogs, hippopotami, sea lions, ice bears, and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 81 

so forth. And if he had not chained them up, 
they would have eaten each other up. I can im- 
agine Noah leading a full-grown orang-outang 
or gorilla across the continent and across the 
ocean. Then again he had to gather food for all 
of these animals. I suppose he petrified it to 
keep it from spoiling. And he must have had 
extra animals in there for food for the pair he 
was to turn loose after the flood, and that would 
give the lie to the story that he had only a pair 
of each. When he turned them loose I should 
have liked to have seen what happened ! And as 
lice and fleas, etc., multiply so fast, he must have 
had the ark full of that kind and more than a pair 
of each. Furthermore those tropical animals 
could not have existed in the region where Noah 
lived, neither could the Arctic animals. Some of 
them would have died, and that would have left 
him short. There is no use in talking, even if the 
Bible does say so, this story cannot be believed. 

The building of the tower at Babel is another 
story. Report has it that the people wanted to 
build a tower so they could walk to heaven. God 
was afraid they might come up to heaven (wher- 
ever that is) and he confused them so they could 
not talk to each other, thus preventing them from 
building. You see, God did not want them in 
heaven, meaning the sky overhead. Well, this is 
a delicious fable. Just consider the possibility of 
erecting a structure reaching into heaven as 
heaven is understood. With even modem methods 



82 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

of engineering it would be impossible to build so 
high. It would topple over when it reached a cer- 
tain height. And people can go only so high and 
live; the heat would be so great people could not 
live, and the atmosphere, having an uneven pres- 
sure up there, would kill everybody. Of course 
when the tower fable was written people did not 
know that; otherwise they would never have writ- 
ten it. Moreover, they could have continued 
building even if they did not understand each 
other. But all this is foolish, for God would not 
have had to do that because they would have quit 
of their own accord. Getting the material up 
high means something. Under their method they 
carried everything up and it would have taken 
years to make the trip. They would never have 
been able to get enough food to feed that crew. 
And the atmosphere would have killed everybody 
at a certain height. No ; God would not have to 
be afraid of their getting to heaven. But this 
just shows the method people had of reasoning. 
It shows their conceptions. As an individual 
learns from childhood, so generations learn in 
stages. A child's reasoning is just as logical 
from his standpoint as a man's is. But to a 
grown person things look different; they are far- 
ther ahead than the child. So it is with gener- 
ations. We look back and call some things 
foolish, never once thinking that generations 
hence some of our things will look foolish to 
them. But each generation has its work to do as 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 83 

it sees it, and if those Bible stories have served a 
purpose, all well and good. Today, however, 
many things in the Bible have no place in it. 

I am not trying to put the Bible in disrepute. 
If the Bible is God's word, as the ministers claim, 
it is of no avail for anybody to do anything 
against it, because God's word will stand and 
stand forever. In the light of the foregoing ex- 
planations, however, nobody can claim the Bible 
to be God's word. God is insulted and made a 
liar and blasphemed all through the Bible. Take 
your Bible and try to put into practice the things 
which it upholds and you run counter to our 
laws. If, then, the Bible laws are contrary to the 
laws of our land, we surely have no use for the 
Bible. Read Mark 4:12 where Christ is quoted 
as saying people shall not understand so they can- 
not become converted and have their sins for- 
given. (John 12:40; Jer. 20:7.) In John 
5 : 31 Christ says, " If I bear witness of myself, 
my witness is not true." In John 8:18 he makes 
the statement that he bears witness of himself. 
In Matthew 10 : 21 murder is sanctioned ; in II 
Sam. 12: 11 polygamy is sanctioned by the Lord; 
in Deut. 28 : 30 God punishes an innocent woman 
for the disobedience of a man by making her com- 
mit adultery, though in one of the commandments 
he says, " Thou shalt not commit adultery." Read 
Eccl. 3 with particular reference to verses 19-22. 
This makes God a liar, Christ a liar, hell and 
heaven a lie, the resurrection a lie, man's immor- 



84 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

tal soul a lie and so forth. Ministers are all liars 
according to this, for they preach that man is a 
privileged character, destined to a higher life; 
they preach Christ's godliness, Christ's resurrec- 
tion, heaven, hell and of all this they say, " God 
said so." It is God's word, not theirs, they claim. 
Where is man's immortal soul.'' So long as cattle 
have not the responsibility man has, they stand 
a better show for heaven than man does, for they 
all go into one place (verse 20). 

Better, let us read the Bible in that sense which 
says, " Search the Scriptures, prove all things 
and retain only the good." Proverbs 1 : 20-28 
contradicts the quotation, " Search the Scrip- 
tures, for God withholds wisdom." Matthew 24 
(3 and 34 especially) foretells the coming of 
Christ and the end of the world, — that is, it 
should have come to pass before the generation of 
Christ had passed away ; but this generation died 
nearly 1900 years ago and still the world stands. 

Enough proof has been brought to show that 
the Bible cannot be believed literally. We can 
believe only the truth in it, and it is up to us to 
teach to that effect. The truth is the truth al- 
ways, no matter where found. And if a liar 
speaks the truth, then the truth is the truth. 
God wants us to be independent. We must learn 
our lessons so we know and do not have to guess ; 
that's why these lies are mixed in with the truth. 
We must not be like children that have not learned 
to rely upon their own judgment, but will say 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 85 

and do and believe almost anything. Take your 
lesson from nature and you will see that principle 
applied everywhere. You can't put your hand 
in the fire because somebody says it won't hurt 
you. It is for you to know how hot that fire is. 

By taking things for granted and not using 
their brains, the clergy have succeeded in foisting 
upon the people the custom of routine prayer. 
The clergy have strayed away from Christianity 
so far that they have nothing to offer and there- 
fore they grasp at anything at all that will take 
the place of the real thing, much as a drowning 
man will grasp at a straw, thinking it will hold 
him above w^ater. Prayer has its place, but 
routine prayer is a humbug of the biggest kind. 
Imagine the people all over the world, anywhere 
in the universe, in heaven so-called, and hell so- 
called, all talking to God. There is not a sec- 
ond's rest night or day as all the people do not 
sleep at the same time. It is daytime all the time 
somewhere and many prayers are said at night. 
They are all talking at the same time, so to speak. 
What a pleasure it must be for God to listen to 
this noise incessantly ! Thousands of different 
tongues and dialects are spoken, and the harmony 
of this must surely sound well. Think of it : mil- 
lions of people applying to God at the same mo- 
ment. Do you think a little mortal can influence 
God by his talking and wishing? Somebody com- 
mits murder or sets fire to a town at night, burn- 
ing to death dozens of people; then he offers up 



86 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

a prayer, repents and is forgiven, — for we are 
taught that God heareth prayer and will forgive. 
Or somebody corners some necessity of life and 
starves thousands of people to death by his greed 
for money. He prays for forgiveness and is an- 
swered. No redress at all for those poor unfortu- 
nates who suffered untold agony ; all the evil- 
doer has to do is to see to it that he is clever 
enough not to get caught by the authorities, and 
thus keep out of the penitentiary ; then he is all 
right. God he can dispose of with a little talk, 
a prayer. 

Again, you can see evidences all around you 
that prayers are not answered. People are them- 
selves aflBicted with ailments, or have relatives who 
are afflicted; parents have suffering children or 
are themselves suffering; all over the world peo- 
ple are suffering the pangs of hell, their condition 
sometimes becoming so unbearable that finally the 
poor victim commits suicide. Millions there are 
whose condition is so hard to bear that the 
thought of suicide is with them constantly. For 
all these conditions prayers are offered, but the 
victims nevertheless carry their condition to the 
grave. Not every individual prays or is prayed 
for, but the general condition is prayed for. 
Two people have the same ailment ; one prays con- 
stantly, but he gets no better results than the 
other fellow in the same condition who is not pray- 
ing. Nay, the fellow who prays all the time 
would rather take his chances with a man (doctor) 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 87 

than with God, and that even though the doctor 
be an atheist, agnostic, infidel or blasphemer. He 
wants the cleverest doctor he can get even though 
in his opinion the doctor is going to hell when he 
dies, and though under other circumstances he 
would not sleep under the same roof with him or 
give him his daughter for a wife. But let him be 
sick or d^dng, and, if he thinks this man can make 
him well, he would rather trust him than to de- 
pend upon God. 

Why, then, is this so.^ What power has 
prayer.'' Is it simpl}^ a platitude to be used so 
long as everything goes well, and to be cast away 
when results are wanted.'^ There are some who 
depend upon prayer and lose when if they had 
called a doctor, they would have lived. Let the 
child of the praying person fall into the water and 
the parent kneel by the shore and pray. Again, 
let the child of the infidel fall into the water, the 
infidel going into the water after his child. Which 
do you think has the better chance of being saved? 

One point where all nominal Christians are liars 
is when they pray, " Give us this day our daily 
bread." As a rule they all have more than 
just enough for that day already. Some 
have enough for weeks, some enough for years 
and some can't spend theirs in their lifetime. 
Then they pray, " Give us this day our daily 
bread,'^ they possess it already, but still ask 
for it. It is hypocrisy pure and simple to 
ask for something you already have. They are 



88 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

liars pure and simple, for they would not trust 
God to feed them that day if they did not have 
the food in their possession already. And those 
that have only a limited amount would have un- 
limited amounts were they able to get them to- 
gether. It is only their inability to accumulate 
that cool million that keeps them from having it. 
They won't trust God; that is why they accumu- 
late. I do not blame them for accumulating, but 
why do they pray, " Give us this day our daili/ 
hready'' when they don't trust God to furnish it. 
Either man is a liar or God. If God has prom- 
ised to furnish daily bread, he must do it. 
If he does not do it, he has broken his word. But 
God never has promised to furnish bread daily, 
for most of us live in countries where it is impossi- 
ble to furnish daily bread. We must put in a 
supply, not only for one year after another, but 
for longer, for sometimes we have a crop failure 
and we should fare badly if we had no reserve sup- 
ply. 

They will pray, " And forgive us our debts as 
we forgive our debtors." This hypocrisy has no 
equal. If the mortgage draws six per cent, the 
unpaid interest draws ten per cent. If a farmer 
who depends upon God for his crop has a crop 
failure for some reason or other, — hail, drouth, 
storm or whatever the reason,^- and he has no 
income, or if his stock dies from some severe disease 
so that he loses his whole herd, he can't pay the 
interest, let alone the capital. His Christian 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 89 

brother will not forgive him his debts then, but 
where the original draws six per cent, the interest 
draws ten per cent. I am not censuring an3^body 
for this, but I do hate this hypocrisy of praying 
one thing and doing another. Such actions make 
a man either a deliberate liar or an ignoramus. 
That the Christians so-called do not believe in 
prayer may be seen right along. 

One point I want to mention here is regarding 
their ministers. They always claim that prayer 
helps and man cannot do much alone. Yet one 
minister is regarded as more clever than another. 
They will listen to a sermon from one minister and 
call it worthless ; another minister's sermon can- 
not be lauded high enough. The consensus of 
opinion is that one is more capable than the other. 
Now the second minister may run his sermon off 
just like a phonograph, while the other is at sea 
for words, etc., but they both prayed to the same 
God before they started to deliver their sermons, 
that God would put the words in their mouths and 
prepare their hearers so as to bring blessings upon 
the meeting. Having prayed to God, he has not 
answered their prayers, for one delivers a good 
sermon and the other a poor one. For that mat- 
ter the fellow who delivered the good sermon may 
not have prayed to God at all ; he may be a wolf 
in sheep's clothing at that. The man who de- 
livered the poor sermon may be honesty and good- 
ness itself and he may have sincerely prayed to 
God to help him make his sermon a good one, but 



90 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

his congregation pronounces him a failure. Has 
God answered prayer? They will not give a cer- 
tain minister a call because he cannot preach well 
enough. The man is not clever enough or not 
educated enough. In the next breath they tell 
you the man does not count; it is God behind the 
man. Not brains, but the heart is needed. They 
can quote Scripture galore where God worked 
miracles to prove the contention : " A little child 
shall lead them." If some unschooled, honest, but 
poor brother speaks a truth, a bit of the wisdom 
of Christ, he is ignored; but let some rich, influ- 
ential brother propound a most foolish platitude 
and he is applauded. 

Again, they pray, " Thy will be done on earth 
as it is done in heaven." They claim to do the 
will of God here on earth and they go right on 
making slaves of their fellow men, perpetuating 
a system of master and servant, conspiring to 
raise the prices of everything, making laws for the 
oppression of the poor, making the poor poorer 
and the rich richer. 

And in proportion as the individual is incon- 
sistent, so are the masses and the nations, for the 
individual is the basis of the masses and of the 
nations. To illustrate this let me quote from 
history. Our forefathers felt the oppression of 
England. They prayed for deliverance. They 
drafted the Declaration of Independence in which 
they declared, " All men are born free and equal." 
Now note: some of the very same men who signed 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 91 

the Declaration of Independence had, and owned 
at the time they signed that document, black 
slaves ; and they kept them. Some of the signers 
transferred them to their wives so that they might 
conscientiously say they did not own slaves, but 
the slaves continued to do their work the same as 
before, only they were owned in the wife's name. 
Such justice man is willing to deal out. He howls 
like a whipped dog under the lash as long as he 
is oppressed, but directly he feels the load is off 
his back, and he should hand out conditions he was 
clamoring for, he turns traitor tyrant. Again, 
the United States blackened itself with this in- 
famous slavery. It was the strongest point in 
this declaration that, " all men are born free and 
equal." And, pray tell me, in what country was 
slavery as rampant as in ours. They stood for 
the Rights of Man, and how did they uphold the 
Rights of Man? They trampled the Rights of 
Man under foot and declared slavery to be a bene- 
ficial institution and the cornerstone upon which 
to build this republic ! Study for a little while the 
constitution, democracy, religion, slavery, and 
you will always find that one thing is said and 
another done. 

The cause of it all is " man's inhumanity to 
man," the lust for power. Nothing is too sacred 
and everything must fall before the lust for power. 
If people would do as they pray, these things 
would never happen. In other words, were they 
converted to God, these things would never hap- 



92 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

pen. Therefore I say conversion and Christian- 
ity as practiced is a farce. We have a substi- 
tute and not the real Christianity. We are con- 
stantly praying for peace and continually pre- 
paring for war. Such idiocy cannot be surpassed. 
But all this is the natural result of routine 
prayer. Why should we pray at all. God is the 
creator of us all. Our parents are only the means 
to our existence. Now, then, let us call God our 
father. God, being free, wants us to be free, but 
if we have to come begging (praying) all the time, 
we cannot be and are not free. God has plenty 
and gives plenty and gives it freely. He is not and 
does not want to be niggardly. He hates this 
cringing and begging. A great God who has cre- 
ated the universe and given it to mankind free 
expecting us to beg.'' No. Let your imagina- 
tion dwell on the riches of this earth, everything it 
contains, the abundance of it all. Study it, see 
his generous heart ; and then compare the mighty 
little you get out of life, the little you need of the 
vast riches he gave us free long ago, and then tell 
us to beg, A thousand times no. When we by 
our labor get our living, that is all God wants of 
us. Mark you, however, — you must live accord- 
ing to God's will and that trait, — as stated in the 
last few pages showing how inconsistent humanity 
is in saying one thing and doing another, — that 
trait has been the determining factor in creating 
routine prayer. People know what they should 
do, but do not do it, and then want to even up by 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 93 

talking. " Actions speak louder than words." If 
we are created in the image of God, why should we 
be beggars when God is free.? We must be like 
God. But, as stated before, the preachers have 
nothing real to offer, and this praying helps to 
divert the minds of the people, keeps them busy 
chasing something, and prevents them from finding 
out things. And there is just enough corruption 
in mankind to want that kind of a religion. 
That's why these preachers can get away with it. 
A religion of this kind carries with it a certain 
respectability, at least people can pass it for that, 
and still be free to indulge their baser traits. 
They can do one thing and say another. They 
can oppress their fellow beings and still com- 
mune with God. They can pray for daily bread 
and manipulate the market so you cannot get hold 
of any bread. They can pray to God to send us 
prosperity and then form trusts and combinations 
to make hard times. 

And all the while the ministers are on the side 
of mammon. They are never for the poor man. 
They are only throwing out alarms for those that 
can be scared ; they are doing nothing to kill those 
conditions which undermine the country. You 
never find them leading a movement that will make 
this a better world in that it relieves the oppres- 
sion of the poor. Nay, they adopt the methods 
which are in use to bring all the disasters into the 
world. They are using the watchful waiting 
policy, keeping a sharp lookout lest the masses 



94 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

slip away from their control ; if they do, they say 
" We told you so. This we have been trying to 
bring about and we did our share to make it come 
to a head.'* But as long as the moneyed classes 
have control, they never move a finger. It is only 
when the masses have revolted, when the worm has 
turned, that they advocate it. They are always 
on the side of the victor, right or wrong. They 
are not like a pillar for right where the waves 
can break. They are not standing for a definite 
policy of justice aijd right, moving steadily ahead 
and letting injustice smash itself on that pillar. 
No; they are just feeling out the people and try- 
ing to keep control over them. And a fine dope 
to put the people to sleep is routine prayer. 

God being our father so to speak, let us com- 
pare him to our earthly father. A father likes 
to give his family all he possibly can. He stops 
only when his money stops him. He works hard, 
sometimes night and day, to support his family, 
and all his earnings go for his family. He would 
supply a better house, more furniture, more and 
better things to eat and so forth, but his money 
does not buy more. And I want to put in one 
exonerating plea for mankind, as many a father 
resorts to dishonest methods in order to make more 
money so as to be able to raise his children. We 
have the pauper father and the billionaire father. 
But the father gives freely and willingly and would 
give more if he had it. Nay, the parents are 
doing without things frequently so as to give to 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 95 

their children. And they do not expect them to 
pray to them ; they don't make them pay rent for 
the privilege of living in their house, or allow one 
child to live off the labor of another child. Of 
course everybody knows some parents do not live 
as God intended them to, but we will not consider 
them for our comparison. True parents give and 
do willingly and freely for their children all they 
are able to. There are no bounds. And they do 
not want their children to pray to them for every 
meal they get or for anything else they get. 
Parents would feel insulted if the children prayed 
to them for every little thing. The children would 
feel like strangers and they would not be so open 
hearted to their father. They would develop a 
cunning instead of a free spirit. See the mother 
doing for the infant work that you could not hire 
anybody else to do. Is she wanting any thanks for 
it.f^ Must the child get down on its knees and 
pray for it before the mother will do it.^^ The 
child is entitled to everything the home offers. 
But directly you are a stranger you must ask. 

If, then, God is our father, we do not need to 
pray to him because he is our father; and if he 
is not our father, we don't need to either. But 
God is our creator and therefore we are entitled 
to everything free. A human father might be a 
little egotistic and ask his children to say, 
" Please," or he might think it showed better man- 
ners, but the great Creator is not susceptible to 
flattery. Man may feel important and try to 



96 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

make people believe that the world could not exist 
without him, — that is a human trait ; but the al- 
mighty Creator is above that. For God to create 
the universe for mankind free and then ask us to 
pray for a crumb is ridiculous. But since the 
clergy dared not preach Christianity they invented 
routine prayer and offered that instead. 

What good does it do those people to pray who 
according to the Bible are born to condemnation? 
What results might the 70,000 people whom God 
destro3^ed, not for their own sin, but for the sin of 
David, have expected from prayer? Why do the 
majority of the preachers shut their eyes when 
they are praying? Are they afraid to look God 
straight in the eyes? Are they conscious of ly- 
ing? If I tell the truth to a man, I can look him 
straight in the eye ; but if I am lying, I look the 
other way. To be obliged to pray a routine 
prayer, is like humoring your boss in order to hold 
your job. You must humor him so you won't lose 
your bread and butter. You are dependent on 
him. And this makes you a dependent and not a 
free man. God wants free men. Routine prayer 
has no virtue, any more than slavery is freedom. 

Voluntary prayer is the only worth while 
prayer. That originates spontaneously. It is 
the overflowing of feeling over which you have no 
control. It is like the love between husband and 
wife, between the maiden and youth, between pa- 
rents and children. It is there and it is felt, and 
felt deeply, and its full worth appreciated. You 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 97 

don't need a litany to say so. It makes the child 
step up to its mother, put its little arms around 
her neck and give her a kiss and a loving look. 
No word is spoken, yet this action speaks 
volumes ; no amount of words could speak more 
than this act. The love that needs constant con- 
firmation is a weak love; True love is so holy 
that words fail to express it. It can only be felt. 
Virtue is its own reward. Tears of joj'^ speak 
louder than all the phrases you can master. And 
so it is with prayer. Voluntary prayer speaks 
volumes while routine prayer is degrading. God 
is omniscient, and what value do our words 
(prayer) have.'^ If we live according to his will, 
he knows it, and that is sufficient. If we don't live 
according to his will, he knows it also, and no 
amount of routine prayer will make him think an}'' 
differently. When we act one way and talk an- 
other, what are we trying to do.'' Do we think 
we can fool God.'' And routine prayer and our 
actions are not alike. We do one thing and say 
another. And every time we promise something we 
are sure to break the promise. Voluntary prayer 
is always true because it is the overflow of feel- 
ings we possess already ; on the other hand, 
routine prayer comes first, and then we usually 
fail to get the feelings. In a little while we no 
longer feel as we did when we said the prayer. 
Just think how vain God would be to create all 
the people and then make them tell him several 
times a day how they love him. 



98 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

There are all kinds of prayers for all imagin- 
able conditions. Many, very many such routine 
prayers must be lies, and are lies, because people 
do not feel them. They are uttering them only 
because they are compelled to, — God knowing 
them to be lies. Do you think God has any pleas- 
ure in hearing them ? No. A thousand times, no. 
And for that reason routine pra3'^er is an abomina- 
tion to God. He does not want to make liars 
out of us, and routine prayer does make liars 
and God knows it. You may have the power over 
another to make him say or do things and he will 
do your will because of that power, but if he is 
not in accord with you, it will only be forced and 
simulated service, not genuine on his part. It de- 
velops cunning in him and he will try to overcome 
you with all the power at his command. If he 
can't get away from your power, he will have to 
obey, but it is involuntary and you have nothing 
to build on. At the first opportunity he rebels. 
Routine prayer is productive of the same results. 
Therefore it is not God's will. Take a boy who 
does the will of his father. He need not tell the 
father how much he loves him and that he wants to 
do his will. He gives the evidence without saying 
a word. Again another boy will promise every- 
thing, — and does he do it ? In spite of all his 
promises he does not. The first boy acts on his 
feelings, he overflows, — voluntary prayer. The 
other boy acts on routine prayer. 

To this principle underlying routine prayer is 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 99 

due all our misery. This allows us to pray, " Thy 
kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is 
done in heaven," and then go right on doing our 
will, not God's will. Thus we say, " Peace on 
earth, good will to men," and then use more energy 
to invent murderous war machines than we do to 
make Christians. Instead of giving peace we 
make war. Oh, what a calamity. To be sure it 
is only what can be expected from this pseudo- 
Christianity, — this saying one thing, doing an- 
other. Real Christianity would never tolerate 
war. 



CHAPTER VII 

" Thou shalt not kill." 

" Peace on earth, good will toward men." 

** Love one another." 

" Do unto others as you would have others do unto 
you." 

" Love thy neighbor as thyself." 

'* Love thine enemy." 

" Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth 
as it is done in heaven." 

" Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath." 

Christians as they exist claim it is God's will 
to have war. How can any sensible man claim 
that in the face of the above quotations.^ How 
can love and hate dwell in the same Christian 
heart .? War is murder and war is hell and con- 
sequently unchristian. War is worse even than 
murder, worse than butchering ; the horror of war 
cannot be adequately described. Imagine a deep 
trench filled with dead, dying, wounded and well 
people, and cannon being hauled over this mass of 
human flesh, the battle raging back and forth over 
it the while. Here is a man with half of his face 
shot off, another disemboweled, another blinded, 
another alive and unhurt, but about four feet of 

human bodies on top of him. Blood is trickling 

100 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 101 

through this pile of human bodies. All this be- 
cause God wants war. 

The savage does not resort to such cruelties 
as the Christian. Christians want to prove by the 
Bible that God sanctions war, thereby making God 
a party to the killing, when it is a fact that all 
men are his children, be they white, black, yellow, 
red or any other color. What would you think of 
a man so degenerate as to incite one of his sons or 
several of them against one or several of the re- 
maining ones of his family, to murder them? 
Make your own deductions. Then think of the 
allwise and all good Father in heaven doing such 
a thing. First, he creates them in his love, and 
then he kills them by the thousand per day. Such 
a thing is ridiculous to think of, much less to ad- 
vocate as gospel. 

Christians so-called claim that God sent his 
only begotten son out of pure love for the people 
that all might be saved and in the next breath they 
tell you God has sanctioned war to kill them by 
the million. Can anything be more foolish? 
These same self-styled Christians who tell you war 
is of God can be proven hypocrites or something 
much worse. They contend war is of God and 
at the same time say that as long as our nation 
steers clear of war it will be all right. That 
shows their Christianity. It is all right for the 
other fellow to get killed, but not themselves, — 
oh no. Give them a dose of warfare: kill their 
sons and daughters, fathers and mothers ; burn 



lOS THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

their homes ; destroy their crops. See how they 
like it. If God wants them to war, why are they 
not ready to go to war? Why do they tremble 
and weep and lament? Obey your God. Such 
Christians tell you God wants war and they can 
quote whole chapters out of the Bible to prove it, 
but when they must go to war, claim it is unjust 
and that they don't want to go and that it is not 
Christian to wage war. What I want them to 
explain to me is why they quote whole chapters 
out of the Bible to show that God sanctions war, 
yet when they should obey God, they balk, claim 
war is not Christian, and denounce war bitterly. 
Everything they say against war would indicate 
that God does not know anything about war. 
Such idiocy ! It is the acme of foolishness. 

Christians so-called will tell you that God sends 
one nation to kill the other because they are dis- 
obedient. Such foolishness. God wills not that 
sinners die, but live and become converted. In 
the first place, if a nation has sinned, it will not 
become converted by killing. You kill a man be- 
cause he disobeys God and your chances of making 
a convert of him are scarce. Better let him live 
and try something else to make him better. Sec- 
ondly, war never did make peace. It brought 
things to a point where nations had to give up, but 
peace it never did bring. On the contrary it has 
kindled hate, the smouldering ashes of which just 
wait for a favorable wind to lash them into fury, 
as is evidenced by another war for revenge. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 103 

God never sanctioned war ; God never will sanc- 
tion war. It is most absurd to state that God 
ever ordered or sanctioned war. God, who is 
love, can never sanction any so horrible a thing, 
which cannot be described in words, and cannot 
even be defined in feeling, so monstrous is it. 
Human languages have nothing to express ade- 
quately that horrible massacre called war. God, 
the loving father who is all love, who sent Christ 
out of love to save all the people, sets us killing 
each other! Can that be possible? Think again. 
Be honest with yourself ; the answer is known and 
we will forgive. There can be no answer but that 
it is the fruit of a diseased mind which has wan- 
dered away from the teachings of Christ. See the 
foolishness and hypocrisy and idiocy of the state- 
ment so-called Christians make, that God wants 
war, has ordered war, sanctions war and helps to 
gain victories in war. 

Granting, for the sake of those who hold this 
position, that it is so and taking their Bible 
quotations as proof, the only conclusion that can 
be reached is that as it comes from God it must be 
God's will and consequently war is just and in 
accordance with God's will. If that be so, God 
must be obeyed, and God surely knows his busi- 
ness. If it is an order from God, it is not for us 
to question, but to obey. How, then, dare the 
people who uphold war as God's will, at the first 
mention of their going to war start in to lament 
and weep and condemn war, saying it is unchris- 



104 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

tian and inhuman and that they don't want war; 
it is the men higher up who want war, not they. 
Before they quoted Bible to prove God ordered 
war ; now they claim the " higher-ups " are the 
ones who want it. They claim to be Christians 
and a Christian's duty is to obey God; they claim 
war is of God, but when they should stand up for 
their God, they say war is not right. That is 
equivalent to saying that God does not under- 
stand his business. Again, note that after mak- 
ing the statement that war is of God, they con- 
demn war, making God an incompetent ; and when 
they are at war, they pray to God for victory, 
claiming God is strong and can help them to kill 
the enemy, as usually the victory falls to those 
who can kill the most. I want to ask those who 
claim that God wants war or has sanctioned it, 
" Why do you exclaim in your next breath, ' It 
is not of God!' Are you a fool or a h^^pocrite? 
If you are neither, why don't you obey your God? 
A Christian should obey God. Or do you talk 
platitudes ? " Christians claim God has ordered 
war, sanctions war, on the other hand condemn 
war as unchristian, and still go to war and pray 
to God to be a party to the unchristian work. 
What can you make out of that? Are they lazy, 
crazy or hypocrites ? If war is of God, war must 
be just, and why don't they obey instead of ob- 
jecting? 

If it were in my power, I would put all those 
who claim God wants war on a continent and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 105 

start them improving their land, building cities, 
raising fine crops. They should have at their dis- 
posal any and all the resources known to human 
beings. In fact, I would give them all prosper- 
ity as it is known in the world to-day, and in 
abundance at that. All countries import some- 
thing from other countries, but I would give them 
everything in this their own country, and have 
them do, without restrictions, as they might 
choose, building up a most marvelously prosper- 
ous world for them where they might marry and 
give in marriage, and be as happy as you please. 
Then I would start them at war against them- 
selves and have that war go on as war is waged, 
give them a plenty. I would say to them, " Take 
your fill. If it is a good thing, you cannot have 
too much of it. If a little is good, more should 
be better. Take it all. You are welcome to it. 
War to your hearts' content. Be sure you don't 
fall short of what is justly yours. Keep it up, 
and if you don't understand it by the time you are 
fifty years of age, or if you still like it at that 
age and want some more of it, I will prolong your 
life indefinitely, — even thousands of years. Then 
if war stands the test of thousands of years and 
gets the reputation of justice, brotherly love, and 
so forth, and complies with the rules as laid down 
in the opening of this chapter, I will gladly be 
condemned by my Maker to hell and everlasting 
damnation." 

But it cannot be. The warring " Christians " 



106 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

lose. Look over the quotations at the beginning 
of this chapter, and figure it out for yourself. 

To sum up, I want to say to those Christians, 
and others too, if you claim God wants war, be 
consistent enough to obey your God. Where God 
has spoken, it is not for man to question. This 
is your own logic. But I want to tell you in all 
earnestness, God does not want war. It is of 
man's making. War comes as a result of our 
corruptness. " As a man thinketh ... so is he." 
We think war and act war and act in accord with 
war; that is why we have war. If our thoughts 
were peaceful, we should never have war. It 
would be impossible. 

Take a fact presented in exactly the same man- 
ner to different individuals and you have different 
receptions of the same fact. That fact is the same, 
but the impressions are different. If a man have 
a friendly disposition, he will take it in a friendly 
fashion. If inclined to be warlike, he will resent 
it. " As a man thinketh ... so is he," and as 
a nation thinketh so is it. By having war 
thoughts all the time they ache for a chance to 
make war. The desire gets ripe and bursts ; 
that's all. 

A nation maintains a monstrous army and navy 
and the most deadly weapons because it loves 
peace! Is that not ridiculous? Guns will never 
insure peace; on the other hand, they are pro- 
ductive of war. You could, by the same logic, 
carry a gun to insure your peace, but you would 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 107 

not do that. Not wanting to use a gun, you have 
no need for carrying one, but if you carried one 
you would be looking for a chance to try it. The 
same is true of the nation. 

Most wars were fought to extend boundary 
lines. That is an unchristian spirit. While 
other excuses were circulated as causes for a num- 
ber of wars so as to make people believe that for 
this or that reason war was declared, at the bot- 
tom it was territory. Now if we lived in a Chris- 
tian spirit we would have no boundary lines, and 
war would become extinct. It would make no dif- 
ference then where an imaginary geographical 
line was. But when a nation is brim full of fight- 
ing vigor, when it has lots of men and cannon, when 
it feels it can lick another nation and take some 
territory, then it is apt to declare war. If it did 
not have the cannon, it would not declare war. If 
this overflowing strength were put to productive 
labor, it would be a blessing to that country, 
whereas through war it is made a curse. 

Greed and gain are at the bottom of all wars, 
and neither is a godly attribute. Both are human 
characteristics pure and simple; consequently war 
is of human origin and not of God. 

War is the ruination of the world and God 
wants to improve the world, therefore it would be 
against himself to stand for war. The prime of 
manhood is killed off* first in war, then the less 
physically fit and the cripples are left to per- 
petuate the race. Do you think God wants war 



108 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

to kill off the physically fine specimens and leave 
the misfits to breed? Any breeder knows that he 
cannot breed a good herd that way, and surely 
God is not so ignorant as not to know that princi- 
ple. It is surely of more importance to breed 
from the best specimens when it pertains to man- 
kind than when it pertains to the lower animals. 
Even wild animals recognize that fact and live up 
to it. But man, intelligent man, the crown of cre- 
ation, — he alone breeds from the poorest stock. 
Don't you see how far man has degenerated? 
The weak-minded, the criminals and the unfit gen- 
erally are to a large extent the result of breeding 
from the left-overs of war. Talk about your 
eugenics ; such talk is all nonsense. If we lived 
a Christian life, we should all be perfect human 
specimens. We should be born under conditions 
as God intended them to be and we should have 
plenty of what goes to make up life, thus insuring 
us perfect bodies. 

Since we have strayed away, God tolerates war 
that we may gain a lesson if we are inclined to 
learn thereby. Man as a free agent shall rule 
the earth in accordance with God's will, but man, 
being disobedient to God, uses his power to subju- 
gate his neighbor instead of applying it altru- 
istically as God wants him to. We see this illus- 
trated in almost everything. We rent the land 
God has given free to all to our neighbor; we force 
prices on life's necessities of all kinds ; our laws 
are one-sided to favor a few ; contracts are written 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 109 

one-sided. Everything is in the spirit of "cinch- 
ing " our neighbor. No matter how the Lord 
blesses the fellow we have a cinch on, we manage 
to raise the rent on him, and if the Lord gave him 
50 bushels of wheat to the acre instead of 15, 
we would raise the rent on him enough so that he 
would always stay poor anyway. Such is the 
spirit that pervades us. We are robbers, and 
that is why we find ourselves at war. If we never 
wanted anything that is our neighbor's we would 
never be at war. 

It is man who is greedy and covets, and not 
God; therefore man causes wars and not God. 
God lets us war that we may learn and see the 
awfulness of our ways. War and God are in- 
compatible. There would be no war if we minded 
God. And there would be no war if the fellows 
who shout, " War," had to fight them. 

The poor fellows who fight get none of the 
spoils. They are just as poor after the war as 
they were before the war. It is only a few of the 
privileged who profit by it. To be a soldier is the 
very opposite of being a Christian. A Christian 
does the will of God, a soldier does the will of man. 
Therefore, again, war is of man's making and not 
of God. If war is of God, you might as well 
throw everything that tries to elevate the morals 
to the winds and let people do as they please, for 
what is the use of bringing out the finer traits of 
mankind and then teaching them that murder is 
necessary to keep the world going? What is the 



110 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

use of teaching your boy to be polite, considerate, 
honest, saving, chivalrous ; what is the use of edu- 
cating him so that he can use his brain and go ac- 
cording to his convictions and teachings, so he 
can tell right from wrong? The moment he be- 
comes a soldier and goes to war he has no more 
use for these things. All a soldier has to do is 
obey, even if the order is against his reason and 
teachings. Politeness is thrown to the winds when 
he enters a town, burning, plundering, murdering. 
Consideration, honesty, frugality, — where are 
they.f^ Chivalry, where is it when women are out- 
raged.'' And the better soldier he is, the more 
destruction in all lines he works. The very basis 
of war is plundering and destruction and ruina- 
tion. You cannot be a soldier at war and put the 
quotations at the opening of this chapter into 
practice. Therefore, again I say God never 
wanted war, and God and war are as incompatible 
as a powder magazine and fire. 

And to pray to God for victory is blasphemy 
more horrible than war and its consequences. 
Those who are killed are best off; the remainder 
are to be pitied. Look at the crippled, — some 
blind, some without legs and arms, some insane, 
some diseased, some ailing, others made beggars. 
Look at the widows and orphans. 

The hypocritical clergy say in performing the 
marriage ceremony, "What God has joined to- 
gether let no man put asunder." Then they quote 
chapters out of the Bible to prove that God sane- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 111 

tions war, and when at war they pray to God for 
victory; and victory comes usually to those who 
can kill the most. Who is putting asunder what 
God has jovnedf Who makes that woman a 
widow? They tell you marriage is holy and insti- 
tuted by God and they can make much fuss about 
it. If the clergy could only scare the people 
enough so that they could have it all their own 
way, nobody would be allowed to get married ex- 
cept by a minister. Then they give the marriage 
vow the lie by praying when at war. 

Then think of the wholesale marriages per- 
formed during this war, the men too often being 
absent or possibly dead, but still they were mar- 
ried. Think of the cry, " Breed before you die." 
Think of it, think. Where is the sanctity of mar- 
riage? Think of the war babies. Think of the 
venereal disease produced by this war. Think 
of all other diseases produced by this war. War 
is so horrible it baffles all description, it is in- 
human. People suffer starvation, lands are 
devastated, minds upset, families destroyed. And 
to some the war will never be over. Generation 
after generation will be suffering the effects of 
this war in thousands of different ways, some by 
disease, some by poverty, some in defective mental- 
ity, some by unfavorable birth and so forth. 
Think of the trail of misery this or any other war 
leaves behind. Can you then say war is of God? 

It is the duty of every person and especially 
every Christian to do all in his power to avert 



112 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

war. You can have war only when you have men. 
Everything else used for warring purposes is use- 
less if you haven't men. Have you ever stopped 
to think what it costs to raise men? And who 
raises the men.^^ And when you raise anything it 
should be your property and you should have the 
"say-so." When a rich man has property and 
the war breaks out, he can make millions out of 
his property. The government will not confiscate 
his property, saying, " We need it for war." On 
the contrary, prices will be so raised as to be out 
of reach and we must pay millions of dollars extra, 
all on account of the war. But when it comes to 
the most valuable property, your son, your own 
self, a soul, an image of God, then you can't make 
a dollar out of him, let alone millions. He or you 
are simply confiscated and you have not a word 
to say about your own life or about your own 
soul. If you murder some other poor soul you 
have never seen and lose your own soul, you have 
nothing to say. See the injustice and folly of 
such doings. 

Wars are waged for property, for lust, for 
power, — all things of little or transient value ; 
and to acquire that property of questionable 
value, Man and Woman and Child, — the most 
valuable, priceless property, — is given. The 
worst of it is, God has given us this property al- 
ready; we have it in the world and it is doing its 
duty in the world. The world doesn't gain the 
property ; it is only transferred by war to a dif- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 113 

ferent set of people; the world is none the richer. 
And the people we have killed and their labor de- 
stroyed by war makes the world so much poorer. 
If you look at it rightly, it is the same as spend- 
ing two billion dollars trying to raise the Titanic. 
In war times prices on commodities are sent sky- 
ward, but man costs nothing. He is simply taken. 
A man might be poor and hardly able to raise his 
family, but he is taken and his family left to shift 
for themselves, — go hungry, starve to death or do 
as they please. Or millions of people may be 
brought to starvation, but the man who controls 
the supplies of the world is approached with a 
" Please be so kind as to sell us your goods." 
And no matter what price he asks, it is paid. See 
the absurd folly of it. 

When at peace, we are chloroformed with tales 
of what great and free and independent beings we 
are ; man is the crown of creation and without him 
the world could not exist. But when some power- 
ful nation wants to steal from a weaker one a 
piece of land which God has already given to the 
world, then we don't amount to anything; then 
prunes and beans have more value and are more 
highly respected than man or his rights. Where, 
then, is man and soul.'^ Your objection that you 
don't want to kill the stranger you have never 
seen is of no avail. 

I have often heard the remark that there are too 
many people in the world ; therefore we must have 
war and kill off a few million. I have heard it 



114 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

said by converted Christians( ?). The pity of it 
is that this principle was not applied to the fel- 
lows who made the statement. Just think, God, 
in creating people, creates too many and then de- 
clares war to kill off the surplus, — like drowning 
a bunch of kittens or pups. By the same reason- 
ing a man who thinks he has too many children 
could dispose of them in the same way; he would 
not have to wait for war to do that. There are 
never too many people. By living a Christian life 
everybody could have enough. The trouble is 
we do not live according to Christianity, hence all 
the suffering in the world. If there was anything 
to the statement that there are at times too many 
people in the world and that they have to be 
killed off by war, God would be a murderer, for 
first he creates them and then kills them off. 
Such reasoning is silly. If God had no more 
land, he would not create any more people. He 
could let people become sterile and thus stay the 
increase. God would find a way to balance the 
amount of land and the number of people without 
first creating them and then killing them. 

The Bible is full of statements that represent 
God as a man of war, but, as stated before, we 
cannot believe everything in the Bible. We can 
believe only the true and those things which we 
know to be in accord with Christianity. Read 
Joshua 10, where God is made a party to war, 
verses, 8, 11 and 13 particularly. God made the 
sun stand still so that they could keep murdering. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 115 

In II Kings 11 and Isaiah 38: 8, God turned the 
sun backwards. Can any sane person believe 
that? In many places God is quoted as a strong 
man, one who can kill any number of people in war. 
Judges 1 : 19 he was unable to drive the enemy 
out of the valley because they had chariots of iron. 
Surely this is enough to make one agree with Jesus 
when he said in Luke 24+: 25, " O fools, and slow 
of heart to believe all that the prophets have 
spoken." The Bible tells you in Micah 3 that 
you cannot believe the prophets, priests and 
judges (heads). Read the chapter carefully; 
read it again. Note verse 11. Money is at the 
bottom of their teachings. They did anything for 
money. They taught and made the people be- 
lieve their teaching was of God. They spread lies 
deliberately, and people in these days try their 
best to make themselves believe those lies are the 
truth. The priests and the prophets were a 
drunken lot (Isaiah 28:7—8). They were un- 
scrupulous, and nothing was too low for them to 
do ; read Ezekiel 22, with emphasis on verses 25 
and 26; Hosea 6:9; Jeremiah 5:26—31 and 6: 
13. Under those conditions originated the de- 
scription of God as in Psalm 18 with special 
reference to verse 8, and of Christ as in Rev. 
1:13-16. 

Again I say, all Scripture is not given by in- 
spiration of God. We must search the Scriptures 
and retain only that which is good. And mistake 
not, when we search diligently and understand- 



116 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

ingly, we will come to the conclusion that war is 
not of God. If we lived as God wants us to live, 
we should not have war and we should not need 
war. But as we insist on living after our own 
fashion, contrary to the will of God, war is an 
inevitable result. Humanity feels that there is a 
higher power, and if they would listen to the voice 
of their bosom, they would obey God. But the 
stubbornness, the contrariness that dwells in the 
human heart will not let them obey. They know, 
but they don't want to obey. We see this every 
day. We see it in our intercourse with our fel- 
lows and we do the same with our God. God 
knows the unavoidable result and knows that that 
is the only way we humans will learn. He has 
sent us misfortunes of all kinds, but still we will 
not heed. There are enough who will not heed 
the war lessons, but the world learns just the same. 
In the end all things are beneficial to the human 
race, no matter how high the cost, but we don't 
appreciate anything unless the cost is high. War 
is costing dear. One or a dozen wars may pass 
and we seemingly not have learned, but we will 
finally learn our lesson from war. What, then, is 
the lesson to be learned from war.^^ As stated 
time and again, we are disobedient ; we don't do as 
we know God wants us to. We know that we 
should obey God above all else, — obey the ring, 
the voice of our bosom above the voice of our 
mind. But we don't do it, we don't want to sur- 
render all, we want to keep some strings. We 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 117 

want to have something to say ourselves. This is 
all very natural as that is the inborn trait of free- 
dom. We have some grounds for thinking so, but 
the trouble is we are too premature. We don't 
wait till harvest, till the proper time comes. As 
long as we are on earth we should obey the voice 
of our bosom, should let that be the governor over 
our mind. We must be trained first for the life 
to come, to be like God, and that takes more than 
a life on this earth. If we finally graduate, then 
we will automatically have something to say about 
choosing our superior. We are like children who 
want to be wiser than their parents ; like the ap- 
prentice who feels he can give the boss lessons ; 
or the child who, when it begins to spell and re- 
peat words, asks the parent if he can pronounce 
that word, or, having made a crude drawing, asks 
the parents if they can draw as well. Just so, 
we can't wait for the fruit to get ripe when we are 
young. We have the feeling that there is a supe- 
rior but we want one of our own making and that 
is where our trouble comes in. That superior, 
having the same disposition as the ones who cre- 
ated him, so to speak, becames unfaithful to his 
trust just as his creators have been unfaithful to 
their trust or inheritance. And to show us that 
we can't exist indefinitely by living our way, God 
tolerates these wars. But wars are of human 
origin and never of God. 

Finally, after having enough wars, and those 
wars being cruel and fiendish enough, we shall 



118 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

learn. We shall learn that emperors, kings, 
queens, presidents and so forth are not the proper 
persons to worship. We shall find out that they 
are not possessed of the power usually accredited 
to them. We shall also learn that we are misled 
by them. We shall find out that they have not 
our interests at heart. We shall find out that 
some are traitors to their country; that they are 
only furthering their own selfish ends. Some who 
have been surrounded by halo will be relegated to 
darkness. Some have ruined their own country. 
Some have taken money and sold their country. 
In fact, war is an eye opener all the way round. 
It takes a great deal to awaken people from their 
lethargy, but while the cost is high, terrific, it is 
the only way people will learn. 

A new thought will arise out of war. People 
will be finding themselves and eventually they will 
abandon their gods and flock to the only God, 
the creator of the universe. Then they will 
abandon the spirit, the war spirit, as we use it now 
in our daily intercourse with our fellowmen and 
instead will dispense the spirit of brotherly love. 
If you have not so far noticed it, pay attention 
to the manner in which we do business with our 
neighbor. We are haughty, insolent, defiant. 
We exhibit no brotherly love. I don't mean that 
every individual is that way, for there are a few 
real kind people, but that is the general spirit. 
We look for advantage and, sad to relate, only 
too often we must have it or we would draw the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 119 

short end. That shows the lack of Christianity, 
and that is the spirit underlying war, — a spirit of 
human origin and not of God; consequently again 
I say war is of man and not of God. We show 
this spirit right along in times of peace, and war is 
just another expression, another result of that 
feeling we have toward one another. 

Our professed friendships are as a rule only 
thin veneer. Friendships are all too often main- 
tained for personal gain. Personal gain is an- 
other unchristian spirit. True friendship, — that 
is, one benefiting the other fellow, — true friend- 
ship which lasts through all ups and downs to the 
grave, is so rare as to be said not to exist. Take 
friendship which is seemingly genuine and you will 
find personal benefit is nourishing it. So, then, 
as we are dominated by such spirit, we must of 
necessity wind up in war. 

I want to quote to those Christians who claim 
God orders wars and who can quote Bible galore 
to prove their point, the campaign slogan of 1916, 
" He kept us out of war," — meaning President 
Wilson. That should prove to them that God 
has nothing to do with war. I have not heard one 
clergyman calling President Wilson to task for 
that slogan as assuming powers he did not possess, 
for if war is of God, they should have challenged 
that statement. But that is the way of the 
clergy ; they make a lot of fuss and when it comes 
to a showdown they are not there. So at the bot- 
tom of war lies selfishness. Coarse selfishness is 



120 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

the ruin of noble things and a drag on progress. 
And to refine this coarse selfishness, making it 
transcendental is our duty. This is saying in 
other words that we should become Christians ; 
should be obedient to God, follow the voices of our 
bosoms, the ring in our breasts. Then and then 
only will there be no more wars. 



CHAPTER VIII 

What, then, are the traits of a Christian and 
what will insure us Christianity? By what signs 
can we know them? A Christian is a man or 
woman or child who has learned to refine his in- 
born coarse selfishness. Having* made that coarse 
selfishness transcendental, a person will not seek 
his own selfish gain, but will always aim to give, 
so to speak, — to be altruistic. Such a person 
will always be considerate of the welfare of the 
whole world in preference to himself. Transcen- 
dental selfishness is that beautiful self-love which 
realizes that one must train himself to be a power 
for good by being considerate of the interests of 
others. That is the only way to think of one's 
self, to love one's self, to love one's self in the 
spirit that one may serve others and be a power 
for the good of the world and the advancement of 
the races. For you must yourself be good if you 
want to do good, and that is the spirit in which 
you should love yourself, not in a spirit of coarse 
selfishness seeking only your personal gain, no 
matter at whose expense. Transcendental selfish- 
ness will improve the world and is at the bottom 
of all that is good and noble, while coarse selfish- 
ness always works destruction and is the cause of 

all evil. 

121 



12^ THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

Do not confound transcendental selfishness 
(self-love) with conversion. A converted person 
is not a Christian. The world is full of converted 
persons, but they don't apply the principles of 
Christianity. They use the principles of coarse 
selfishness. Being converted does not stop a per- 
son from continuing a system of master and serv- 
ant, nor from exploiting his neighbor. Conver- 
sion does not go deep enough; it is superficial; 
while transcendental selfishness goes to the bottom. 
To be a Christian you must " love thy neighbor as 
thyself," give him the same chance you ask for 
yourself ; to be converted you can love yourself all 
you want to, hog all the land you can get hold of 
and then rent it to your neighbor. And if you 
are afraid he is making too good a living, you can 
raise the rent high enough so as to keep him at the 
starvation point. Under conversion as in vogue 
we have misery and starvation in every country, 
no matter where we find it. Under Christianity 
those conditions could not exist. By what divine 
right are we allowed to control the destiny of our 
fellows .f^ We have none. A Christian must give 
full value in return for everything received; a 
converted man can make a profit of thousands or 
millions of dollars. That is perfectly compatible 
with conversion, but entirely incompatible with 
Christianity. Under conversion we have paupers 
and millionaires ; under Christianity we would 
have neither. Paupers are necessary to make mil- 
lionaires and millionaires are necessary to make 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 123 

paupers. Everything is created by labor, and if 
we lived a Christian life and returned value for 
value we should not have paupers and millionaires. 
But under conversion we can create conditions by 
which it is possible to get the other fellow's value 
without returning an equivalent. 

Let us return to the beginning of the world. 
What was there in the world that was worth any- 
thing and could be used by man.'' There was 
nothing but raw material. The hand of man had 
not yet created anything. To all the raw mate- 
rial man's labor had to be applied in order to 
make something out of it. The raw material is 
worth nothing, so to speak, where it is. It is 
only after man's labor is added that it assumes 
value. Therefore those who labor are the ones 
to whom that value belongs. That is Christian 
philosophy, transcendental selfishness. But coarse 
selfishness which is only working for self to the 
detriment of the other fellow claims the product 
of the other fellow for itself. And conversion 
does not change this principle nor the condition. 
Thus it has become possible for the wealth created 
by the laboring class to pass into the hands of the 
non-laboring class. 

And the clergy, what have they done for a rem- 
edy.'' Nothing. They are always on the side of 
money. Those acts are unchristian. No matter 
how much they pray and talk in platitudes, nor 
how loudly they declare that by conversion people 
are made Christians, they are not Christians so 



124 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

long as they abide by unchristian rules. God cre- 
ated the earth free and gave it to mankind free. 
But millions upon millions have been born into 
this world and have had to pay a pretty stiff 
price for a piece to make a small living on. And 
the longer the earth stands and the more people 
are born into it, the higher the price goes until 
it gets so that a poor man cannot own any. If 
God is our father, why has he no land for some 
of his children when other children have much 
more than they can use? You see we are not 
living a Christian life, we are not living accord- 
ing to God's will; that's why we have those con- 
ditions. Nobody ever received a deed to land 
from God; therefore it is unchristian to gobble up 
all you can and sell it at a higher price to the 
next man. The Christian principle is to give 
value for value; an even exchange. 

I can show you that this holding of land, or 
anything else, for a higher price is not according 
to this rule. Suppose one man owned the whole 
world. We give it all to him as we can never get 
enough and if it were in people's power to own it, 
they would get it. Now if he were the only man 
on earth, no other person at all beside him, how 
much would that land rise in price? Some lands 
have risen to an alarming extent. What would 
be this man's price per acre or per foot? Some 
choice lots in cities sell for thousands of dollars 
per square foot. Would he raise his price every 
year? Just imagine one of our present day land 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 125 

hogs in that position. He would not have any 
price on it. He would be wanting to give it away 
if there were only one more man on earth to keep 
him company. He would give it all to him if 
only he could have one man to associate with. 
This shows that it is not the man who happens to 
hold the deed to a piece of land who makes it 
valuable, but the ones who don't hold the deed. 
Consequently if we lived a Christian life, the value 
would go to the other fellow. 

A man holding a deed to the most high-priced 
lot in New York City to-day, — what has he done 
to make it so valuable? His father may have 
squatted on a piece of land or traded a string of 
beads for a section of land with the Indians. To- 
day that piece of land may be selling for twenty 
thousand dollars a square foot. He himself does 
not work on that lot; it may be he has not been 
on it for 50 years ; nevertheless he is collecting 
increasing rents from it. If the country had re- 
mained as it was, it might not be worth the string 
of beads originally given for it. But God cre- 
ated people, and now he wants such a price. 
Don't you see that it is on account of the people 
who don't hold the deed that this land is getting 
high priced.^ And if they are the cause, they 
should have the increase if there is any. That 
would be Christian. But the converted man 
takes the profit for himself. If there were no 
people living there, he would abandon his land 
and follow the crowd. Christianity says, " Do 



1£6 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

unto others as you would have others do unto 
you." By following that principle one cannot 
collect an increase on that land because the one 
holding it is not willing to lose the amount he is 
willing to take as his profit. You see he is selfish 
and a liar even if he is converted. 

You claim the unearned increment is yours. 
Why don't you buy with the intention of selling 
it as much cheaper as the amount you expect to 
make? If it is fair for the other man to give 
you something you have not earned, it would be 
just as fair to let him have that much when he 
hasn't earned it, for Christianity says, " Do unto 
others as you would have others do unto you." 
You want from the other fellow something you 
have not earned, so you must, as a Christian, be 
willing to give him a like amount. But you do 
not feel like doing that ; consequently you are not 
a Christian, you are only converted. You are 
still possessed of that coarse selfishness. 

All our earthly doings, all our earthly customs 
are on the principle of taking and not of giving. 
Our every action is governed by the principle of 
taking. We don't aim to give. How can any- 
thing hold out by always taking? If you always 
draw on your bank account and never deposit, 
how far will you get? And we are living a life 
on this earth where the majority deposit and the 
few always draw. And as long as the majority 
deposit and the few draw, there will always be 
money in the bank. But when the draw fellows 



THE CHRISTIANITY. OF CHRIST 127 

have to depend on their principle or custom (in 
the next life) for their living, always drawing and 
never depositing, I shudder when I think of the 
hell they are in, for you can't live when every- 
body draws and nobody deposits. Therefore we 
should have Christianity, not so much for the 
poor of this earth as for the rich. For we will 
be separated into our class after death, and those 
selfish people will have a terrible time. 

We are always drawing classes on this earth 
but we can't get away from the earth. We are 
always considering ourselves in a higher class, a 
better class. We don't want to associate with 
our inferiors, but I tell you in the next life you 
would like to be with a pretty low class from this 
earth because they will have and you will not. 
Then the lesson of the rich man and Lazarus will 
be better understood than it is now. You will 
not be in your class because somebody bears you 
ill will; no, you will just be there on your own 
account. Your own philosophy will put you 
where you belong. You will get just what you 
earn. You maintained on earth that what you 
did was right ; then you will get your own logic 
applied to yourself. The only difference will be 
that here on earth you were in mixed society; in 
the next life you will be in your own exclusive set. 
Here on earth you are asked to incorporate into 
your being the principle of Christianity and then 
live by it. You are the judge and jury for your- 
self whether or not you are honest in the matter 



128 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

and the kind of treatment you have handed out 
on earth will be handed to you in the hereafter. 
Christianity gives value for value, an even ex- 
change, and you surely cannot complain when you 
get back exactly what you gave. Oh, but here on 
earth were so many who did the depositing and 
you mingled with them; but when you are in your 
own set it is diiFerent. 

Take the land hog, for instance, or any man 
who maintains that it is right for man to own 
land, this God-given free land, in order to ex- 
ploit his fellows, to raise the price of land to a 
point where it automatically prohibits the poor 
man from buying. Let him awake in the next 
life in a country where that is the custom. He 
is poor, he cannot afford to buy a foot of it. 
Rent is high. He has to make his living. Imag- 
ine how he gets along. Those fellows who claim 
it is right to own more land, or anything else, 
than they can use will wake up to find that all the 
land is taken and nothing left to get hold of. 
They will get back their own medicine. 

If we had Christianity, it would not be so bad 
on this earth, but the lack of Christianity causes 
this saying one thing and doing another. This 
lack of Christianity has given us religion and con- 
version to human ideals instead of conversion to 
God and ideals of God. That is what makes it 
possible for a man, be he converted or not, to 
claim he is a Christian and then exploit his labor- 
ing men, — to pay his girls starvation wages 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 129 

which compel them to lead lives of prostitution. 
He may pray the loudest in church or sing in the 
choir and still rent his houses for immoral pur- 
poses. Usually the best paying church members 
have connections with odorous transactions. 
Conversion allows a man to do that, but Chris- 
tianity never. 

I'll try and show you how the pseudo Chris- 
tianity as it is in vogue is acquired, and how it 
looks from the standpoint of genuine Christian- 
ity. At a revival meeting they are brought to a 
pitch where they are made to believe they want 
to be Christians. They become converted and 
are now Christians, they think. But they are 
not Christians. Something has transpired in- 
wardly and they don't know just what; they are 
told they are Christians. But in all this turmoil 
through which they have gone they have not 
learned to regard the other fellow as the one to 
whom the Christianity should bring the blessings 
of their conversion. The thought is only of self. 
Some may go so far as to quit Ij^ing about the 
other fellow, but that is all. He will the next 
day make a sale of a piece of property clearing 
three or ten thousand dollars if he can and con- 
gratulate himself on a good stroke of business, 
not once thinking that he virtually stole that 
much from the other man. For that reason he 
has not real Christianity. These nominal Chris- 
tians come under a spell, become converted (but 
not to God) and then want to make things con- 



130 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

form to their ways because they think they are 
Christians. They still keep living along the prin- 
ciple of coarse selfishness instead of on the prin- 
ciple of transcendental selfishness or self-love, 
self-love being used in the sense that you love 
yourself so much as to not leave a stone unturned 
to beautify your character and to follow princi- 
ples so high that you radiate them profusely like 
the summer sun, freely, abundantly and inces- 
santly for the uplift of the human race and the 
improvement of the world; that you love yourself 
so much that when you find you have omitted to 
do good you feel ashamed of yourself for being 
negligent, or feel ashamed like an honest man who 
has temporarily forgotten himself and given way 
to a temptation and is caught in the act of doing 
something wrong. Therefore conversion as it is 
in vogue does not make Christians. It may im- 
prove the morals of some, but that is all. Some 
are even worse after their so-called conversion 
than they were before, and all too many, realizing 
their low character, ape conversion so as to be 
better able to do their dirty work. 

People by their conversion apply to themselves 
the name Christian, but don't follow it up with 
Christian deeds ; therefore they are no Christians. 
They claim the result at the beginning without 
first going through the diff^erent steps necessary 
to make the result, which is like wanting to get 
your diploma from college first and study after- 
wards. Of course you would not be able to fulfil 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 131 

your requirements even if you did have a diploma. 
If you had the diploma first and tried to fulfil 
the requirements for a diploma afterwards, you 
would not study so hard as you would if you had 
still to get the diploma. You would slight a good 
many hard studies ; consequently you would not 
be entitled to be called what your diploma 
calls you. Just so Christians, as they exist, do. 
They apply to themselves the name Christian, but 
don't deliver the goods. You must deliver the 
goods first and then you can receive the title. 
The right minded student is ashamed to use the 
title he is preparing himself to get until the time 
comes when he has fully earned that title. Like 
Christians so called, some students when they have 
been at college a week apply to themselves the 
title which the college course confers, even getting 
cards printed to display, and in the end may fail 
to graduate. In like manner is Christianity han- 
dled, or at least the sort which is put out for 
real Christianity. Some buy diplomas when they 
flunk. Others buy diplomas without going near 
the college; they know nothing about the busi- 
ness, but they are called by the title purchased. 

So are our Christians as they exist in the world 
to-day. They call themselves Christians and are 
not. A right-minded man would hate such a di- 
ploma as he would the pestilence. You could not 
make him accept it. When he has earned it hon- 
estly he doesn't expect to boast of it and palm it 
off on his clients as something great, as some- 



132 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

thing that can do the work. To him it repre- 
sents an ideal, something he has delivered full 
value for and he is proud of it because he has done 
his best. He is even fearful lest he fail to meas- 
ure up to what the diploma stands for. So, too, 
is the genuine Christian fearful lest he be found 
wanting. But nominal Christians are quick to 
grab the name and do not deliver the goods. 
They stay in the a, b, c class forever. They re- 
peat a, b, c all the time and think they are 
professors of the school. Or at most some get 
into the freshman class and stay there, all the 
while claiming the title the diploma could con- 
fer upon them. Such is the Christianity deliv- 
ered, and that is why Christianity as God or- 
dained it does not exist. 

True Christianity after God's plan must be evi- 
denced by deeds and words, and be just. The 
deeds must fit the words and the words must fit 
the deeds. You cannot say one thing and do an- 
other. Neither can you do a thing and try to 
explain it was not meant that way. Christianity 
is " Yes " and " No " ; no " Ifs " and " Ands." 
And it doesn't need any explanations. It is plain, 
easy to understand. There is absolutely no rea- 
son to question it. It has more radiance than the 
summer sun. " Do as you say ; say as you do," 
explains it all. " Do ynto others as you would 
have others do unto you." Be willing to take 
what you are handing out. Reverse unflinchingly. 
Christianity is something you apply to your neigh- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 133 

bor and by extension to all people. Christianity 
is interchangeable ; it is alike no matter from what 
angle you look at it, or who displays it ; it is al- 
ways the same. It is the code of ethics between 
human beings, and if there were only one person 
on earth, there would be no need of Christianity. 
Christianity need not be defined very much. Just 
follow the voice of your bosom, let it reign over 
your mind and you will fulfil the requirements of 
Christianity. You need no other guide, — no Bi- 
ble, no preacher. 

The trouble is, the preachers are the ones who 
are misleading the people. And because of them 
we have this pseudo-Christianity. That's why 
Christianity as practised is only for self and not 
for our neighbor. To be sure, sometimes they 
attempt to make it look as though they might be 
doing something for the other fellow, but when 
you sift it down you can always find selfish reasons 
for the act; it's not because they love the other 
fellow. It's me first, last and all the time. This 
is the custom the world over, and to change this 
is the work of the Christian. If the people who 
call themselves Christians would pursue this pol- 
icy, they would be entitled to the name, but as they 
move no finger to lift the oppression, they are 
counterfeits. On the contrary, they befuddle the 
people and teach them hatred, hatred against 
everything that won't come under their power, — 
hatred even to war. And bloody wars they were, 
those religious wars. 



134 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

So it behooves every one to be watchful and take 
nothing for granted, lest you lose in the next life 
and suffer. If you were too lazy to do your own 
thinking and you suffer because you followed 
somebody's teaching, you have only yourself to 
blame. Use the brain God has given you and you 
will be held responsible only in the measure that 
you received understanding. If you feel you are 
called to preach (I don't mean preaching as the 
clergy preach), do so. If you feel you should 
write a book, do so. Don't stop because you think 
you are no speaker or writer. If you have a 
thought from God, spread it and it will be taken 
up by others. You may be picked out to start 
the thought and others may have the next thought 
from God. These others, again, may be polished 
speakers and writers. And finally the thought be- 
comes worked out to where God wants it, to the 
place where it will work for the uplift of the hu- 
man race and the glory of God. Thus is the 
chain forged link by link. Your part is just as 
important as the next man's. 

Maybe God wants several to work on it so that 
one will not grow conceited. Thus you are meant 
when God said Adam. The Bible Adam lost be- 
cause he did not follow his instructions. He was 
either too lazy to think or he considered himself 
clever and thought he could beat God. You can't. 
It works against you every time. The command 
to Adam not to eat of the tree of life is given fig- 
uratively as applying to our whole life. We can 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 135 

do everything without limit so long as we keep 
within the boundaries set by God. That is to say, 
there is a wide range in our freedom of action ; to 
make this clearer I will illustrate it by lifting. 
We can lift one pound or ten pounds or a hundred 
pounds ; some may be able to lift five hundred 
pounds. We are able and free to lift, but there is 
a limit. So it is meant in the command; you are 
free to do, but the voice of the bosom will tell you 
when you have reached the limit. By obeying, 
you train yourself to be a fit subject for the next 
life as God wants you to be. By disobeying, you 
do not come up to the standard; you are short; 
consequently you cannot enter where you might 
have if you had obeyed. Then you find yourself 
cast out of the garden of Eden. Adam said, " the 
wife thou gavest me," but that is no excuse. 
Adam and yourself are given to know. It is for 
you to know and to be sure. You cannot put the 
blame upon anybody. 

Again, you may say, " Well, the Bible said so 
and so and so, and I was told to believe everything 
the Bible says. Surely you cannot go wrong by 
believing the Bible. I would stake my life on the 
Bible, for that is God's word. Why did the world 
put forth the Bible as God's word if you must 
search the Scriptures (use your own brain) ; why 
does God permit the Bible to be thus advertised? 
Had it not been for the Bible, I should not have 
believed it, but it was in the Bible. I was duped 
and deluded; I am not to blame. It is purely 



136 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

God's fault for allowing the Bible to be used that 
way." Take care. God has given to you power 
to know. If you don't know, it is your fault. 
You cannot blame it upon anybody else. It is 
said that Eve handed the apple to Adam, but he 
lost completely. His wife should be the best 
friend a man has and he should be able to trust 
her fully, but the lesson shows us that Adam lost 
completely, and if his wife could do that to Adam, 
your Bible may be able to do the same thing to 
you. You may even believe the Bible more than 
you would your wife. But beware. Know, and 
take nobody's word, not even mine. All I want 
to do is to awaken your mind and get you to think 
and study and know for yourself. You are not 
prepared for the next life unless you know. Fol- 
lowers are not wanted in the next life, but inde- 
pendent, knowing men and women. Therefore you 
must know what constitutes a Christian. 

A Christian will not take advantage of another. 
He will always give full value in return. That is 
the training he gets,^ when he meets with a man 
who is guileless of possible trickery, not to take 
advantage of him because he happens not to know. 
A Christian acts on the motto, " Do unto others 
as you would have others do unto you." He 
would not want the other man to take advantage 
of him; consequently he won't take advantage of 
the other fellow. There is no difference between 
a man who cannot see with his brain and a man 
who cannot see with his eyes. Both are alike in 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 137 

their respective work. One can't get it through 
his brain, the other can't get it through his eyes. 
Of course the blind man is always blind and the 
blind brain is so only temporarily. The man 
whose brain can't see a certain transaction may 
be much more clever than the man who beats him 
in a certain deal, only he is ignorant, or not famil- 
iar with the peculiarities of this particular deal. 
He may be too honest, or he may not be trained 
in the crooked ways of such dealings. A man can 
have the best pair of seeing eyes and a blind brain 
so to speak. There are all kinds and degrees of 
blind brains, up to the most violently insane. 
Then again a person may have a very acute brain 
and be totally blind and be harder to cheat than 
the person who can see with his eyes, but not with 
his brain. Men, including converted ones, are 
quick to take advantage over the other fellow. 
That is where a Christian differs from them; he 
will not take advantage of anybody under any 
circumstances. It is a Christian's duty to show 
both sides of the case. And whether he shows 
both sides of the case or not, at all events he must 
act as described. 

This condition of brain blindness is the biggest 
stumbling block to the advancement of Christian- 
ity. You have probably had an argument with a 
man and tried your best to show him where he 
was wrong, but all your persuasion failed. 
Finally in desperation you said, " Can't you 
see? " meaning his brain, for his eyes were prob- 



ISS THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

ably better than yours. This blind brain busi- 
ness is ofttimes nothing but laziness. If people 
would use their brains, they would develop, but 
through inaction they atrophy. I have abso- 
lutely no use for this class of people, and any 
suffering that comes to them through this laziness 
is not one bit too much for them. Sometimes 
others have to suffer on their account and by 
rights these lazy ones should also suffer this, for 
it is through them that it happened. But there 
are innumerable conditions where you can takS 
advantage of the best of them. That should not 
be. In all our relations with one another we are 
always playing for our own advantage. If we 
lived a Christian life, we should not have any ad- 
vantage and we should not need one, but so long 
as it is the custom to beat, we must all beat; 
otherwise we lose. 

In religious matters we see the same principle 
applied. The principles of Christ are not used; 
otherwise we would have unity and universal love. 
If the principles of Christ were in use, this fren- 
zied European war would not be. But the blind 
brain is at fault. So it is in trying to enlighten 
people on religious matters. I realize to the full- 
est extent that to try to help people in religious 
matters is an ungrateful task. In fact, it is a task 
that is hardly worth while. Nobody can accom- 
plish anything. God sent Christ to straighten 
them out; but what was the result? They cruci- 
fied him ; that was the end of God's best endeavor 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 139 

to help the people. How, then, can a poor human 
do anything to show them the error of their ways ? 
One might as well try to shove the United States 
into the ocean as to try to show people the way 
to salvation once they are set in their belief. 
Each is ready to denounce the other believer but 
when it comes to themselves it is like an irresistible 
force meeting an irresistible body. There is, how- 
ever, one little ray of light and hope in under- 
taking such a task, and that is that while you can- 
not do much with the masses, you will find a few 
stragglers ready to listen, which makes a man 
feel well repaid for undertaking this hard task 
and for the derision heaped upon him. People 
would not listen to Christ and they crucified him. 
If Christ was to preach to-day to those who claim 
his name, they would hang him as of old. Things 
are the same now as then. The church people of 
Christ's time are still with us. And to-day any- 
body trying to spread real Christianity receives 
the same treatment for spreading a false doctrine 
that Christ did. Lies are believed easily, but the 
truth must fight for every inch. The beauty of it 
is that while lies are received with open arms, they 
are cast away again after a time, but the truth 
does not retrace one step. It stands forever. 
That's why truth is Christianity and Christianity 
is truth. These terms are interchangeable or 
synonymous. Therefore, dear reader, I implore 
you to think, study this work for your own good. 
You call your actions just because you have hap- 



140 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

pened to be able to make what is called a success 
out of this life. You are making money by exist- 
ing conditions. Any scruples that may come to 
your mind are overcome, sometimes easily, some- 
times after a struggle. You overcome the voice 
of your bosom because, well, you can make money 
and if you were in the other fellow's place you 
would like to turn the tables. So you yield be- 
cause you gain. Selfish gain determines your 
actions. And thus you raise in yourself the seed 
from which to grow the crop of the next life. 

But in the next life you may not be successful, 
you may not make connections just right, you 
may not be making money, so to speak, and then 
you will be poor. Then your philosophy may not 
look to you as it did on earth. Then you will be 
in hell, in that state of mind w^here worry never 
ceases, where you realize what you have lost, what 
you might have, and what you do have. And mis- 
take not, laws as they exist on earth are not Chris- 
tian laws. In the next life you will be dealt with 
according to Christianity ; that is, you will be 
treated according to your own logic, which you 
practised on earth. You are creating the condi- 
tion of your own state of mind. Have you sup- 
pressed, have you subjugated, have you put your 
work on the other fellow, have you lived upon the 
earnings of others, — you are the one who set up 
that standard and you will live by the rules of 
your own standard. Then you will have your 
own logic applied to you. It will be applied in 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 141 

accordance with Christianity and not in the 
twisted manner in which we on earth like to apply 
it. On earth, when asked to help improve condi- 
tions, we don't do it. We keep up the prevailing 
system because it is to our financial benefit or 
other advantage. We could help, but we will not. 
We make more money the way it is or gain some 
other advantage. In the next life, when you are 
suffering under j^our own burden, under the rules 
that you on earth called right, when you are ask- 
ing the fellow you refused on earth for help, he 
cannot help you. He is not in your class and he 
is not allowed to come into your class. He would 
help you in the next life but he can't. He is not 
allowed to. On earth you were together and you 
could have helped him if you had wanted to. But 
you didn't. Now you must live under your own 
rules. Christianity gives you back what you put 
in. You are measured by your own measure. 



CHAPTER IX 

We have seen how Christianity stands for jus- 
tice, that a Christian will not take advantage of 
anybody on any condition, and that conversion 
does not guarantee justice. A converted man is 
not proof that he will give you fair play. He can 
be converted and still skin you alive. That is in 
perfect harmony with conversion and religion. It 
also appears that religion is mainly used to the 
detriment of the people, for no matter under what 
religion people live, they are not getting much 
benefit out of it. All too many religions are used 
as a direct means for making fools out of people. 
They are made to believe the most absurd things 
in the guise of religion. If they met these same 
things in common, everyday life, they would call 
them lies, but when they come under religious dis- 
guise, people lose all reason and make themselves 
believe any old thing. Religion does not alleviate 
oppression, nor work for the emancipation of the 
oppressed. On the contrary it is always on the 
side of mammon, and one true statement in the 
Bible is this, " You cannot love God and mam- 
mon." Think it over and you will find it so. The 
next time you are about to make a bit of money 

off your fellow man, think of this statement. See 

142 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 143 

if it comes up to the Christian rule of " Do unto 
others as you would have others do unto you." 
Would you be satisfied to receive the treatment 
you are giving if you were in the other fellow's 
place ? 

I know we can't live by Christian rule as every- 
thing in this world is contrary to Christian rules. 
Therefore it is impossible to put Christianity into 
practice and for the same reason we have no Chris- 
tianity. We have some honest people, but the 
best of them cannot live according to Christianity, 
for we do not all live by the rules of Christianity. 
The rules of the majority decide. The most peace- 
ful man cannot live in peace among man-eating 
cannibals. Their rules are different from his. I 
am not finding fault with any individual, even if 
correction is due him. The majority of people 
probably live as best they can under existing con- 
ditions, and oftentimes not realizing that condi- 
tions are unjust. They simply accept things as 
they are and try to do justice as they see it and to 
conform to custom. Be this as it may, we have 
no Christianity, and Christianity is the only way 
for people to live and be happy and be entitled to 
a place in the next life where justice reigns. 
Therefore we should discard religion and accept 
Christianity. 

That is the only excuse for writing this book, 
not fault-finding, not grumbling, but in the spirit 
of love pointing out the wrong and trying to show 
the way out. I hate a grumbler, a kicker ; he is a 



144 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

man (or woman) finding fault for the sake of 
fault-finding or to see others in misery. They 
never accomplish anything and cannot accomplish 
anything because there is nothing back of them. 
They have no policy for the uplift of the world 
and the world would be better off if they had 
drowned in their first bath. But the goodhearted 
man, the man of conviction, who sees the wrong 
and has the courage to stand up and fight in love 
for the right, he is to be commended. Those are 
the fellows the world needs. 

There are enough wrongs in the world to be 
righted, and there are a good many ways by which 
it can be accomplished. Anything to improve the 
world is welcome. All these diff*erent ways have 
virtue and do some good, but the only lasting way 
and the way of the ways for the improvement of 
the world is Christianity. All other ways will in 
time fail or be misused, but Christianity can never 
be misused nor will it ever fail. Religions have 
failed and will fail again, for one thing is said 
and another done. And if something is to be 
" put over," it is placed as a miracle and that 
clinches it. That is the best refuge, — just call 
it a miracle. Miracles don't work nowadays. It 
takes solid facts. If miracles would work in this 
age, we could create an ideal world. But since 
miracles no longer work, let us set about to im- 
prove those conditions which are a shame to a 
civilized people. 

Let us examine some of the things our religion 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 145 

tolerates. There is an old saying, "A chain is 
no stronger than its weakest link." We can ex- 
tend that and say a nation is no stronger than 
its weakest man. Again we can say the world is 
no stronger than its weakest nation. Knowing 
that, why don't we live up to our knowledge .^^ 
When it comes to a chain we are very careful 
not to have any weak links in it. When it comes 
to man we disregard that maxim altogether, and 
are not only negligent in examining the human 
chain, which would be bad enough, but we delib- 
erately go to work and make weaklings. How.? 
By our greed. We make a work animal out of 
man and keep him on short rations. Man is made 
to work, and everybody should work for his own 
living, but some are compelled to do all the work 
and others just live as parasites. This is un- 
christian, but perfectly religious. Keeping a 
class of people on short rations generation after 
generation produces an inferior class. Instead of 
feeding the workers the best and giving them food 
in abundance, we feed the best to the never-sweats. 
The poor man who labors in the dirt and dust all 
day does not make enough to be able to afford a 
bathroom. Those who don't work have the bath- 
rooms. We brag about hygiene and sanitation, 
and stop there. When we should practice what 
we preach, we are found wanting. " A chain is 
no stronger than its weakest link," Wh}^ don't we 
strengthen the national chain.'' Why don't we 
strengthen the human chain? Because we are 



146 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

greedy, selfish, and want to get what is the other 
fellow's, — because of that we don't strengthen the 
chain. We are robbers instead of builders. And 
we know that Christianity would change that and 
we make a hypocritical show and accept religion. 
We have the shadow and not the substance. Re- 
ligion allows a man to rent to his neighbor the 
land God has given to us. God made the earth a 
certain size and put man on it. Imagine how 
many acres the first few people had at their dis- 
posal, — free. And it was free for a long time. 
There was a certain amount of free land and few 
people. Now, this man claims so much, the other 
so much, and so on till finally the younger children 
of God have to pay the older children a very high 
price for the privilege of enjoying a home. Thus 
worketh religion. 

Apply that principle to your own family. We 
have no right to do such a thing and such treat- 
ment will not entitle us to a first class place in the 
next life. God gives life to every human and to 
bring a person to the point where they can be 
exploited costs considerable. If the exploiter had 
to raise them to the age where they become profit- 
able, he would figure the cost more than the profit. 
How much is the land worth to God? How much 
more to-day than it was at the time he made the 
earth ? God has no price on it. He gives it to us 
free, but we greedy and degenerating humans, 
with our hypocritical love for our neighbor, raise 
the price higher and higher. In one sense we love 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 147 

them ; the more there are, the more we can charge. 
If people could control the air, sun and rain we 
should have to pay for it as we do for land. 
But God knew our dispositions and he did arrange 
it so that we could not control it all. The human 
disposition is inclined to be unjust and it is our 
task on earth to clarify it and make it a fit com- 
panion for God in the life hereafter. If we don't 
do it, we are the losers. 

Christians as they exist on earth will not be in 
God's class in the hereafter, for they are not 
living according to Christianity. Under their re- 
ligion and conversion, they claim it is just that 
one be bom a pauper and the other a millionaire. 
They do nothing to correct this evil, — for both 
the pauper and the millionaire are evils. Well, 
these Christians will wake up in the pauper class. 
Parrot-like they repeat, " Two times two is four," 
and then when convenient they say three or five, 
or anything, in fact. That's the way they act 
with their religion. They say, " We are all God's 
children," yet do nothing to correct the evil of 
having one child of God enter this earth a mil- 
lionaire and the other a pauper. Don't they see 
the difference.? Nay, the fact is they, as con- 
verted people, use the rules that make paupers 
and millionaires. They claim to know that two 
and two makes four and that one hundred is more 
than one, but when it comes to humanity they are 
short-sighted. And the Christian's work is for 
humanity and humanity only. Then they don't 



148 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

see that the millionaire baby is ahead of the 
pauper baby. Then they don't know that millions 
of infants are dying because of the lack of those 
things needed to insure life, — and that they lack 
it because of our greed. Then they don't know a 
Christian's work. 

An individual cannot change these conditions, 
but the collective body of Christians can. If we 
had lived in accordance with Christianity since 
the time of Christ these conditions could not have 
sprung into existence in the first place. The fact 
that such unchristian conditions exist is the best 
proof that Christianity has not existed. And be- 
cause so-called Christians do not protest against 
such conditions and do nothing to remove their 
causes it shows that they are in favor of them, or 
that they don't know anything about Christianity. 
Under Christianity man is most precious ; under 
religion, chattels are the first consideration. Un- 
der religion man is a liability and property is an 
asset. And property only exists because man 
made it. All these things exist because we are in- 
consistent, because we say one thing and do an- 
other, because we let something tell us two times 
two is not four. 

We are told God is no respecter of persons, and 
at the same time keep up a system with many 
classes, titles galore. Another place in the Bible 
will say something about the chosen ones. Does 
this show that God holds all alike .^ Again we are 
told God is our father, he is the father of every 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 149 

one, and in John 8 : 44 we are told " Ye are of 
your father, the devil." Such is the logic of the 
Bible and the church people. This human trait 
makes it possible for the Roman Catholics to ad- 
dress their preachers as " Father," when they are 
single men. And right here I want to say that 
this celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy is a 
transgression of the laws of God and humanity. 
The Roman Catholic clergy will quote out of the 
Bible, " It is not good for man to be alone ; " 
" Be ye fruitful and multiply," etc., and then they 
deliberately stay single. Oh, what humbug. 
Men and women are not made to stay single. On 
one hand you have the monks unmarried, on the 
other hand the nuns unmarried. In what other 
denomination can you find this duplicated .^^ They 
take a vow to abstain. Religion, what crimes are 
committed in thy name? The only effective vow 
in this case would be an operation. At present 
there is a great cry about Mrs. Sanger's teach- 
ing the poor birth-control. Those poor peoplfe 
cannot afford to raise children on the starvation 
wages they are getting, and Mrs. Sanger is help- 
ing them, and a howl goes up. But nary a word 
is said about the Roman Catholic clergy. What 
about birth control in their case.'' And the rich. 
Have they any information on birth control.? 
Do you hear anybody complaining .^^ Such is the 
inconsistency of human nature. 

Our work on earth is to refine our nature, and 
religion is supposed to do it by conversion. Does 



150 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

it do it? No. This inconsistency also makes 
the pope infallible. Ye Gods, what a humbug. 
No person is infallible. God is no respecter of 
persons and the pope will have to go to confession 
in the next life just as the maiden went to him on 
this earth, and then we will see what happens. 

Christians so-called will tell you marriage is 
ordained by God. They say that, but give it the 
lie or rather show their disbelief by their actions. 
They are inclined to favor the party with the most 
property as the one they want for a mate. 
Sometimes a boy chooses a girl or vice versa for a 
mate, but the parents object because of poverty. 
The boy or girl must forego the choice of their 
heart and marry one they do not want, all because 
of property and rank — and property decides 
the rank. They then call in the minister and he 
says, " What God has joined together let no man 
put asunder." Yet the party God had picked 
out is not present, but the one chosen by a human 
being. God was overruled. Such is their incon- 
sistency, and still they call themselves Christians. 

Another inconsistency is the Lord's supper. 
They say. " This is my body, this is my blood." 
Everybody knows that what they eat and drink 
is not Christ's body and blood. It simply is not. 
It is bread and wine, or something similar. Now, 
then, since it is not Christ's body and blood, why 
say it is? If they say it represents Christ^s body 
and blood they are again doing wrong, for the 
Bible prohibits the eating of human flesh and the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 151 

drinking of blood. " Thou shalt not eat anything 
unless it has a cloven foot and ruminates." Deu- 
teronomy 12:16, 23-25 prohibits the drinking of 
blood. 

As all our troubles are due to man's greediness, 
why are they always trying to show how elevating 
poverty is? Why is everybody grabbing, trying 
to get rich when poverty is such a blessing? 
Why don't they strive to stay poor and enjoy the 
blessing? Another case of doing one thing and 
saying another. They quote you the birds, how 
God feeds them and how they do not sow nor reap. 
So shall you be carefree, but when you need the 
land to make your living and the price per acre is 
beyond your reach I don't see how that compares. 
They are working Christian Science on you. 
You lay awake night after night because the price 
of land is so high, and then you should not worry. 

As for poverty being a great blessing, bringing 
out man's best traits and character, that is folly. 
While he wrestles with poverty, his mind becomes 
dwarfed, and instead of exerting his mind to 
something high and noble, his thoughts are di- 
rected along channels of slavery. The hard cir- 
cumstances of his miserable existence kill the finer 
feelings, and lofty ideals suffer. You can get out 
of it only what there is in it, from anything, and 
the man who is fighting poverty won't develop as 
well as he could under more favorable conditions. 
A man's heart must be in his work for best re- 
sults. Slave labor never yet created standards 



15^ THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

and high ideals for the world to live by, and never 
will. A sorrowing heart can't write a laughing 
song. Drama is not comedy. True, some fine 
characters may develop out of poverty, but those 
are the exceptions and not the rule. They de- 
velop in spite of it and not because of it. Those 
same people, given a better chance, would do bet- 
ter. Liberty and joy is productive of more good, 
of more lofty ideals, than slavery and sorrow ever 
will be. 

Yes, greediness causes poverty. What some- 
body gains the other party loses. And our 
greediness has no limit. If God blessed the earth 
ten thousandfold more than he has so far, we 
should still have misery and poverty. We should 
pile up the extra blessings and starve our neigh- 
bor just the same. You see the principles we live 
by make that inevitable. We live by selfishness 
and not by Christianity. We have religion and 
conversion instead of Christianity. Millions 
upon millions of dollars' worth of food stuffs 
have been dumped into the ocean in order to keep 
prices high, in order to keep people from getting 
the blessings given to us by God. Not only have 
we deliberately dumped it into the ocean, we have 
wasted billions of dollars worth on land so as to 
keep prices high. How is that for Christian 
spirit.'* Religion calls that just; calls it business. 
Not only do we waste in times of peace, but in war 
times also. 

In war nothing is respected. Everything must 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 153 

give way. That is worse than insane. Things it 
has taken thousands of years to make or bring to 
where they are, are destroyed in a twinkling. Can 
you imagine anything more crazy than that.'* 
And the religious people pray to God to help them 
do it, pray to God to direct their bombs where 
they will do the most damage. Words fail me 
to describe a logic of this nature. It may be 
that they get their reasoning because of reading 
the Bible. If they do, it is high time a different 
interpretation be given to the Bible or that it be 
discarded altogether. If the Bible is what makes 
people go to war, it would be a blessing to have 
it destroyed, — the quicker the better. If they 
cannot learn from the Bible to love their neigh- 
bor as themselves, it is of no use to them. Do 
they learn Christ's way or the devil's way? If 
Christ had interpreted the Bible, we should not 
have war. But the people will find quotation 
after quotation in the Bible that justifies war. 
If those statements in the Bible actually mean 
that we shall make war, as we understand the 
word war to mean, then it should be destroyed. 
If it means something else, then we should have the 
right interpretation of it. If the clergy cannot 
give the right interpretation, we should fire the 
clergy and insist on men who can interpret aright. 
And if these statements don't mean war, but are 
productive of war, they should be purged from the 
Bible. 

If we are to keep the Bible as a textbook, we 



154 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

must have a different interpretation of it, for with 
all our religions, conversion, Bible and preachers, 
we have not attained the least semblance to Chris- 
tianity. We are still doing business for profit 
and not for service. We are still considering the 
earth and all its products as a means for graft 
and gambling and not for the people to enjoy. 
No matter how abundantly God gives, we manage 
to get a corner on it and boost the price. And 
we had rather see things rot than to sell cheap. 
So, whether we belong to a church, are con- 
verted, call ourselves Christians and expect to 
go to heaven, or not, we are not Christians and 
not entitled to a Christian's dues in the next life. 
The masses recognize when they meet Christian- 
ity, and when they are handed a pseudo-article 
they know it. It may take some time to find it 
out, but it will be found out. They feel the in- 
justice of religion and government as it exists 
and resent it. They may be unable to affect a 
change, but the resentment is felt and nourished 
until the time comes to throw off the yoke. His- 
tory has shown that repeatedly, and it will repeat 
itself until justice prevails. 

" The last straw breaks the camel's back." 
The time is coming for religion to change, for in- 
justice is great. Just now we have created con- 
ditions which will call for an accounting from 
God. Mistake not. " Pride goes before a fall." 
Just when you think you are out of danger, the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 155 

crash comes. So it is with nations. We are 
getting rich on the misery of others and we call 
it just. Anybody who has any responsibility, 
who is some force, large or small, in this present 
time, let him take stock and consider if what he 
N does now would suit him if things were reversed, 
if he were getting what he hands out. If he would 
not be satisfied to receive his own treatment at the 
hands of others, let him start to work for justicg 
right now. Such is the work of the Christian. 

Of course there is a shiftless, lazy class who 
could be well off, so to speak, but who are too 
confoundedly lazy, indifferent, careless ; who 
move only as far as they are pushed and whose 
energy used in resisting would, if used for push- 
ing, bring them to comfortable heights. That 
class you cannot help, for instead of being re- 
sponsive they are repulsive. Let them get their 
just deserts. A laborer is worthy of his hire, 
and he is not entitled to any more than he earns. 
But the class who does the work of the world, 
they are cheated. Let us apply the golden rule 
and do unto others as we would have others do 
unto us. 

Let us remember that God has given us im- 
mutable laws and that we are governed by those 
immutable laws only and not by miracles, prayers 
(trying to create something of our own contrary 
to God's immutable laws). How could we know 
anything unless we were to go by these immutable 



156 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

laws. We cannot expect miracles. That is one 
reason that these religions work so much harm. 
They throw common sense to the winds. 

God has given us brains and we should use them. 
He wants us to use them, and they shall be like 
a rock in the ocean, steady, fearless and true. 
No matter how many waves roll against it, or how 
high and threatening the waves may be, they will 
break on the rock and vanish. So with our be- 
liefs. The brain is the rock on which those be- 
liefs will wreck. No matter how mysterious they 
are made or in what disguise they are brought, 
let the brain decide. Each individual is responsi- 
ble for himself and herself. Our brain is to us 
what the compass is to the mariner. Strong and 
mighty waves may push his vessel out of its 
course, and if the ship followed that course it 
would soon go to ruin on the rocks. But the 
compass tells the mariner what to do. So with 
us. Religions of all kinds are hurled against us. 
Strong and mighty pressure is brought to bear 
upon us, and if we yield we wiU soon be ship- 
wrecked. But the voice of God which is in our 
bosoms will tell our minds just what course to 
pursue. If you listen, all is well. If your com- 
pass does not work or you refuse to believe that 
unerring needle, and you shipwreck, you have only 
yourself to blame. 

As the ship crosses the ocean, bound for the 
port on the other side, so we cross the ocean of 
life for the port on the other side, and only the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 157 

compass of Christianity can steer us safely home. 
The compass of religion will shipwreck us. Re- 
member that religion, miracles and prayers will 
not land us home; only God's immutable laws will 
do that. 

If, then, God's immutable laws are the only 
guide to follow, we have no need for prayers. 
Find out God's laws and act accordingly and you 
will be safe. A prayer is usually something 
when you want God to conform to your way in- 
stead of yourself to conform to God's way. And 
it will not work. You cannot fool God. A 
prayer is much in the same spirit as expecting to 
fall heir to a few millions. While you can inherit 
on this earth, you cannot inherit for the next life. 
You get only your own in the next life. It be- 
hooves everybody, therefore, so to live as to get, 
to the right awakening in the next life. It is a 
matter of highest importance, and should be our 
supreme concern on this earth. Size up condi- 
tions on this earth and see the unjust condi- 
tions ; stop and think whether God, who created 
all, would have created so wonderful a universe 
and all it contains for such miserable and abom- 
inable use as we make of it. God created it for 
a better purpose, but we misuse our free agency, 
and therefore we have the unjust conditions. If 
the life on this earth were all there was to man's 
existence, God would have made a miserable fail- 
ure of creation, for billions upon billions of peo- 
ple, untold numbers, never get a just deal on this 



158 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

earth, and surely a Creator of the universe would 
not be guilty of such conditions. A power which 
can create the universe could create just condi- 
tions. God can, but we must become sharehold- 
ers with him and we must be trained. We know 
our duty, but we don^t do it as we see it and that 
is where the unjust conditions come from. There- 
fore those that have been mistreated would be 
prima facie evidence of God's imcompetency. By 
mistreated I do not mean those petty deals one 
individual has with another, but those conditions 
to which we are subjected by birth. What is the 
use of talking justice and God to a bom criminal, 
or to one bom with loathsome disease who must 
suffer therefrom all his life, or to one of deficient 
mentality, and so on down the line, if what we ex- 
perience on earth is all there is to God? Those 
people experience something quite different, and 
they hnom, and all your talk of religion and 
prayer cannot fool them. Therefore we have a 
duty on this earth and can reasonably expect an- 
other life, — not only reasonably expect another 
life, but by study we can become assured of it. 
And Christianity is the only way by which to be- 
come heir to God. Religion will sidetrack you. 
Now, dear reader, I hope I have made it plain. 
If there are statements which seem absurd to 
you, don't fly into a rage. I realize how hard it 
is to convince people that they are wrong and 
how hard it is to promulgate an idea which is not 
generally accepted by the majority. All ad- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 159 

vanced thinkers had to bear the wrath of the 
masses for what they thought were crazy ideas. 
Jesus Christ himself was crucified for spreading a 
false doctrine and stirring up the people. It was 
ever thus. And if Christ were to come upon earth 
to-day and teach, people would not believe him; 
he would receive worse treatment, probably, than 
he did then. If you don't agree with some state- 
ments read them over again and again and study 
them. Think for yourself and you will see that 
we have no Christianity and that the Christians 
so-called are poor material for the next life. It 
is hard to make a change, but the wise man some- 
times changes his mind. Martin Luther had a 
hard time to convince people, and even to date 
there are only a few accepting his views. In this 
work I don't ask anybody to accept my views. I 
have made the statements because they are my 
honest convictions and because I feel God has 
given to me to see things in that light and I have 
a duty cast upon me to make an attempt to spread 
his message. I hope that there will be others who 
will come to realize the truth and that it will be 
the means of awakening the masses. 

I am not finding fault with anybody's belief. 
Everybody is entitled to his opinion. Most peo- 
ple are sincere in their religious beliefs. I have 
seen the time when I followed the teachings of 
some church and honestly believed was doing the 
right thing; nothing could have changed my views. 
Other people are like that. They stand up for 



160 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

their church. But it is easy to see that all our 
religions do nothing for the uplift of humanity 
and that under any form of religion we have op- 
pression and injustice. Therefore it follows that 
our religions are not in accordance with God's 
will and that we must have something else. And 
that something else which fills the requirements of 
God is Christianity. And my earnest wish is that 
the time will come when we may see Christianity 
applied. Then we can truly say, " Thy will be 
done on earth as it is done in heaven." 

Full well realizing how people will look upon the 
statements made in this work, I will quote to those 
who are ready to condemn me an article I read and 
which may give them a little more light. The 
subject of the article created a stir and people 
were sincere in their condemnation and opinions. 
But to-day we look at it in a different light. 
Having seen what the opinion was in 1828 and 
what it is to-day, they may be slower to condemn 
and a little more willing to study this book and 
think more over it. The article follows. 

The Traffic World, Chicago, gives this informa- 
tion: 

" In 1828 the schoolboard at Lancaster, Ohio, re- 
fused to permit the schoolhouse to be used for the 
discussion of the question as to whether railroads 
were practical or not, and the matter was recently 
called to mind by an old document that reads in part 
as follows : * You are welcome to use the school- 
house to debate all proper questions in, but such 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 161 

things as railroads and telegraphs are impossibilities 
and rank infidelity. There is nothing in the word 
of God about them. If God had designed that His 
intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful 
speed of 15 miles an hour by steam, he would have 
clearly foretold them through His holy prophets. It 
is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to 
hell.' " 

A man making such statement to-day would be 
a subject for an insanity commission, but in those 
days it was made in all earnestness and sincerity. 
People wanted to ward off a calamity. Verily 
the world does move. Read, study, think, act and 
all together let us work for Christianity. 



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Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



